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Nick Neuman
@Nneuman
Reinventing the Swiss bank for the sovereign individual | CEO & Cofounder of Casa @CasaHODL.
Joined June 2011
1.5K Following    13.4K Followers
The best thing you can do to protect your Bitcoin against this is to make sure that you are not reusing addresses that you have already spent from. When you spend from a Bitcoin wallet on-chain, it reveals the public key(s) for that wallet. If the public key becomes known, then it could theoretically be reverse-engineered to crack the private key (in this hypothetical future where ECDSA is cracked). However when you deposit into a fresh address, it’s quite hard to correlate it to any specific wallet. If you are using Casa, we manage this for you. When you send BTC from Casa, the change automatically goes to a new address in your wallet. Anytime you receive into Casa, we give you a fresh address without any deposits in it. It's hard to say how likely it is that the core wallet cryptography underpinning Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies could be cracked by non-quantum means; but you certainly can't discount the fact that OpenAI and others are solving a ridiculous amount of long-standing mathematics problems right now. I think this risk results in further necessary investigation (and transparency?) around how some of the largest exchanges and custodians are managing address reuse. Unfortunately address reuse has historically been a best practice at some companies for managing wallets, because it helps avoid fat-fingering and other human mistakes. It’s possible the cryptographic breakthrough risk will start to outweigh the human mistake risk. I also think this is another great argument for why the distribution of risk via self custody benefits the Bitcoin network as a whole. We saw with the Coldcard exploit that it took time to crack many individual wallets, giving people time to move assets to safety. The more centralized the custody of Bitcoin is, the more risk there is from a vulnerability in wallet cryptography.
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