aristarchus.zec🛡 retweetledi
If you want to understand the ZECBTC chart, it's pretty simple.
Bitcoin is caught flat-footed on two related issues: privacy and post-quantum security. The store of value proposition is very sensitive to both, but Bitcoin has no plan for either. Essentially, they will need (recursive) SNARKs, based on post-quantum hash or lattice-based assumptions, merely in order to deal with the *scaling challenges* of the much larger post-quantum signatures. That's just the bare minimum. The kinds of architectural changes needed to integrate all this stuff are beyond what they've ever shipped in Bitcoin's history.
I think they will try, because there's so much money involved, but there's no way they can address privacy at the same time. What's likely to happen is that a consortium of Bitcoin stakeholders (cryptographers, developers, miners, wallets, etc.) will announce a massive effort to address the quantum threat. This will mostly be a response to the one-bit market feedback loop that Bitcoiners actually internalize: number go down. That feedback loop will not communicate the serious competitive risk of Bitcoin's non-existing privacy until it's too late.
Contrast this with Zcash: we've been planning for a quantum apocalypse in both privacy and soundness for a decade. Most of our protocol design discussions are public: you can see for yourself! Our cryptography does not need to be upgraded to be post-quantum private; just an *out-of-band* payment protocol. Our protocol doesn't need to be upgraded to have quantum robustness; just changes to how wallets choose random blinding factors. After the Tachyon upgrade, our architecture won't even need to change for post-quantum soundness; some folding schemes will just need to be swapped out, and we have years to select the best one.
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