How to Build a Quantum Computer Resistant Blockchain With QRL | Michael Strike - QRL

[Music] hello hello how's the audio good good hi everyone uh my name is Michael strike uh I am the speaker and the chief techn technical evangelist over at the qrl so my uh just just a moment about me my classical background is rout switch firewall process Improvement I've been a network engineer for a long time my non-classical career is here at the quantum resistant Ledger uh been in blockchain since about 2013 and uh most of the slides have a lot of the words on it so that I know that half of you probably aren't even listening so you'll be able to Circle back to it if you if you hear anything interesting and I've already moved on all right let's get started we're going to try and do something fun here we're going to try and make blockchain and Quantum fun and sexy one of those might work probably not both at the same time but let's see all right who are we our project is the Quantum resistant Ledger we've been running our own layer one since uh actually that should say 2018 uh we're the only blockchain that in the world that uses an nist recommended DSA since the first block which makes us fully quantum computer secure we have coming up this year by 2025 our Z hard fork and with the hard Fork we're going to be migrating to some some new nist standards uh which we're going to get into a little bit shortly so let's move on who knows what a quantum computer is okay I saw two hands all right let's let's see if we can have some fun with this so your phones your PCS all the computers you see in front of you these are all classical computers they all have what's called very deterministic outcomes quantum computers have probabilistic outcomes and the the part of nature in quantum mechanics that makes it possible to be able to have a probabilistic income excuse me outcome and be able to solve problems that classical computers cannot is because of quantum Quantum superposition and entanglement if I start talking about either of those they will pull the mic but if someone else wants to come down by the booth and I'm happy to do that so essentially quantum computers enable an exponential speed up for solving specific problems such as the elliptical curve discre logarith problem which underpins bitcoin's ecdsa we will get into that a little bit more so this is an abbreviated version but this is essentially how a Bitcoin trans a Bitcoin wallet is created a Bitcoin wallet when you create a private key is nothing more really really more than a 256bit random number using ecdsa with the secp 256 K1 parameters that's a type of ecdsa you create a public key and that's like a one-way function now you have now you have a private and a public key this is also why you can create a Bitcoin wallet offline so how do transaction outputs works this is necessary to understand in order to understand the DSA which I'll get into and also the solution which I'll also get into so when you're doing a transaction output on bitcoin the first thing is you uh you use present your public key the one that you generated from what I was talking about a moment ago you present your public key to the node that you're sending your transaction to eventually that gets hashed using shot 256 it gets hashed a second time and that reduces the public key size essentially the final output is what's actually called the Bitcoin address which gets written to the blockchain in most transaction types but not all essentially what this mean is a Bitcoin transaction sent most of the T most of the time means the public key is exposed and that all goes back to that's okay with asymmetric cryptography you're supposed to be able to reveal your public keys but that also goes back to the 1970s when asymmetric encryption was initially proposed what's a DSA when it comes to postquantum Security in blockchain the DSA is everything DSA is a cryptographic method for signing and verifying data using public key cryptography ecdsa is uh what the DSA that Bitcoin uses and that is based on the ecdlp problem which is hard for classical computers to solve as we talked about earlier everyone with me so far yes all right so what's the problem well Bitcoin and 99% of all other altcoins have essentially a Quantum problem and the problem is sh's algorithm run on a sufficiently powerful quantum computer can break ecdlp and thus ecdsa which is bitcoin's digital signature algorithm and all it it can allow a private it can allow a private key to be created from a public key public key which is not supposed to be able to happen so that's Salt Bay but it's actually I couldn't find a good pepper picture so I really wanted to use him I did anyway public keys are already peppered all over the blockchains me pools uh public keys are being harvested did for future years store now decrypt later all those things public keys are meant to be out in the open and they are so what's that risk older Bitcoin transactions in a lot of cases the public key is stored directly on chain yay immutability but oh immutability also has a couple caveats in that in the early days of pay to public key hash transactions the public key has actually written to the blockchain and there may be funds Bitcoin funds specifically tied to that transaction and maybe and and that's all visible because of you know one of the core principles of blockchain which is mutability so newer bit uh Bitcoin transactions involve presenting the public key to nodes we talked about that a little bit early when I send a transaction or a TX output that I provide my public key because that serves as cryptographic proof that I created that transaction and it ties to my private key and in return when you send a transaction out all Bitcoin nodes broadcast all of those nodes to all other nodes and that way hopefully when a minor solves a block and sends it to a node it will have that transaction in it great okay so this all leads us to something called Shores algorithm so this is a quantum computer specific algorithm it's Quantum it is not classical it's developed by by Peter Shaw a brilliant mathematician in 1994 designed to run only on quantum computers although you can simulate it using a classical computer and it has the potential to break RSA and ECC or ecdsa like we talked about with Bitcoin by efficiently finding prime factors of large numbers so the latest estimates and this has been on for a while now are that is that a quantum computer with up to around 2500 logical error corrected cubits could potentially break bitcoin's 256bit ecdsa we're not there yet we don't think we are there yet we're not there yet uh a lot of people like to talk about quantum computers as far as being able to take over the hashing market and being able to up the difficulty by finding by solving cryptographic problems with it that's really not that's really not that feasible the A6 the worldwide A6 and the power that's been drawn right now that would be a that would be attacked by Grovers which gives you a c a quadratic speed up to be able to find the pre-image in order to mine faster than all of the miners it's not really a problem the biggest problem right now is going to be uh Shores algorithm and uh like I said we're looking at less than 2500 logical cubits and that lesson 2500 really is Right based on the technology as we understand it now it doesn't accommodate for future advances in algorithms uh improvements to Shores algorithm it doesn't maybe there's a it doesn't it doesn't apply to the type of quantum computer being a trapped ion or fonic whatever so Bitcoin can just hard Fork I love this question so as with many things in life it's really the nuances that really get important I would say Bitcoin can hard Fork but I wouldn't say Bitcoin but Bitcoin can can just hard Fork first off you can hard Fork I give a lot of credit to uh blockchain developers are some of the most creative people in the world and I'm only saying that because there's everyone here is a developer and I'm outnumbered as an engineer so but Community consensus on new DSA and block numbers for uh Community consensus on a new DSA would needed be needed you'd have to select a block number in order to uh start your new postquantum digital signature algorithm you'd have to upgrade all the you'd have to successfully hard fork and then you'd have to deprecate all that ecdsa stuff that I talk about that is all doable there's nothing in the rule book there's nothing in there's nothing in the community or physics or anything that says that that can't be done but I'm going to tell you guys what the catches are and these are the things that people don't talk about this next slide even if you execute it perfectly users are going to have to make a manual transaction from the old Bitcoin address that they have to the new postquantum secure address be it a Lamport signature or whatever this is a manual thing it can't be automated it will be impossible to migrate all the 21 million Bitcoin the 21 million is a magic number in the ethos of blockchain it'll only ever be 21 million well there's going to be unfortunately it would have to be less because you won't be able to migrate all of them and there will be orphans that is the that by the way that is Annie she's the most famous orphan that I know and just realized how old I was God so the other thing is the old dsas must be deprecated before powerful quantum computers exist in order to protect non-migrated Bitcoin also migrating old wallets to new postquantum secure wallets will take a minimum of 74 to 300 days I recently had a podcast where we're talking to some academics that are doing a paper there is 70 to 7 their estimate was 70 to 80 days and that's just Bitcoin processing power in order to take that old ecds ecdsa uh Bitcoin address and migrated so you'll need at least 75 times excuse me 75 days of some people like to call it downtime I don't like the word downtime but those transactions would need to be interlaced with normal TX outputs and normal Bitcoin transactions that's suff that that's that's substantial that's that's a lot of processing time uh also we have no idea as to the real state of quantum computer progress uh government have no reason to tell us and they stopped returning my email so except n those guys are great they always they always return my emails so here's the current ecosystem here's the blockchain the blockchain challenges that we have first off no ERC no ER c20s are postquantum secure you can tell me whatever you want about an erc20 you can you can you can take the Library of Congress you can xmss wrap it and then put it on the blockchain but at the end of the day if a quantum computer can empty your wallet and steal Ste all your gas you're not going to be able to go anywhere with it you're done 99% of blockchains use ecdsa and are thus vulnerable and the other thing is you need to be post Quantum secure since the first block otherwise you have this huge mess that I'm describing in that you have to go and have all of those previous transactions migrated to a new DSA deprecate the old DSA and then and then make sure that everything's there and then you eventually have to cut off the old DSA and stop the transactions and whatever hasn't migrated is lost so maybe that's so maybe BTC becomes btq or I don't know someone will figure that out these are some known attack vectors I'm not really going to go through them how am I doing on time six minutes okay uh okay these are some known attack vectors you got a lot couple of these have to do with the double spend and if anyone that studied studied Bitcoin history you know that that was one of the biggest problems that the satachi white paper solved was the uh double span problem uh based on uh solving the uh uh bantine Empire problem oh let me go back one more uh if you have time ask me in person about a novel attack Vector called Rogue node Theory so a lot of us a lot of us has heard uh not your keys not your crypto we all know that right not your cryp right we're all self custody no okay some of us I saw two hands but also not your node not your rules and that's not as well known but it it is relevant because these nuances that I'm talking about that make these attack vectors uh that make these attack factors realistic or work depend what some of them depend on that but uh Rogue not Theory depends on not your node not your rules always run your own node so for if you're looking at other blockchains that are that claim postquantum security there's a few I put together a few checklist items first off as I mentioned before block the blockchain should be postquantum secure since its first block this second one might seem a little silly but it's really not if if you look at volume and uh market caps does the project have an actual chain is a DSA in cryptography recognized by industry experts government state hoods nist people that know what they're talking about and the experts is is the DSA recognized by them or is it something that's close Source or proprietary or whatever are there any remaining Legacy dsas that are not postquantum secure on the blockchain if so then I can create a transaction here that's not post Quantum secure and I can create one that is post Quantum secure but somehow it's the same token or the same coin right that doesn't maintain fungibility and that coin should be wor they should maintain value this coin 1.0 of this coin should maintain 1.0 of this coin and uh meaning an additional post Quantum secure transaction type does not not a postquantum secure blockchain make that is Yoda and he is a little upset because he was browsing the internet the other day and he saw the uh a lot of postquantum claims that might not that might not be the whole story so we have a solution at the qrl how much time he's gone we have a solution at the ql I'm going to move forward a little bit we are coming up with a hard Fork it the hard Fork is called project zand we're moving from proof of workk to proof of stake we're using all nist government grade security we're adding solidity compatibility if you're able to code in ethereum you'll be able to code on our chain in po postquantum secure since the first block you'll be able to tell your customers that you if you if you deploy code on us and you have your code running on ethereum if your smart contracts on both places you'll be able to in some way tell your customers at your post Quantum secure this is a big deal guys this doesn't exist anywhere else if you want to go postquantum if you want to go postquantum secure today besides besides with qrl you're going to have to make some compromises and believe me if you start making compromises and in security and blockchain the trolls are going to find you online real quick we announced our test we announced our beta test NET LIVE as of yesterday this is all Day Z well day one day one information you'll be able to set up and test your own private node give anyone that wants to take a screenshot I'll leave that on for just a sec how am I doing on time two minutes do not take my word for it don't trust the guy in the Hat governments are working on this problem as well if you see your state there this is a this is a short list it's not a complete list but it gives you an idea as to how many governments are working on this problem Oh and uh United States of America us just just moved their target deadline a few months ago from 2035 to 2030 in order to upgrade all of their postquantum all of the uh systems to postquantum security these are corporations big guys they're all working on Quantum CPUs this did not exist 5 10 years ago things are changing things are different this time do your own research NFA questions come see us at Booth 419 I think that location's right uh those are some links feel free to screenshot and uh that's it I'd ask any questions but uh I'm getting the eye so I think that means I got 20 seconds left before the mic cut oh okay any questions did that make sense so uh minimum staking as it is right now is 40,000 qrl that's last I heard 40,000 ql is the coin price times the number of ql 40,000 you'd have to I I I don't know what the price is right now sound sounds like someone knows all right hey guys thank you so much I mean uh blockchain and Quantum it's difficult to talk about this stuff you try to make it fun but uh don't repeat any of this at any after bar parties thank you