General Discussions

[Thryleon]

I suspect your trust in Bitcoin's encryption might be a tad over-stated, as is the general faith in digital systems, anyone who does enough scientific computing knows the problems I refer to, so they generally do not comply 100% to the math that designed them. Certain points values can overflow which becomes a tell for cryptographers, this can also be device dependant, with various platforms having different weakness. It's no different to when Diffie-Hellman was cracked, that wasn't brut force it was a math issue with digital systems. Collect enough data and these regular patterns of conversion between analogue math and digital algorithms becomes more obvious as artefacts in the data.

So I wouldn't ignore the possibility that authorities might be able to seed the ledger with certain data and from that derive some critical knowledge of the blockchain. Not much different in method to how Turing and others broke Enigma and Lorenz. I appreciate it's a bigger problem, but it's not beyond state level actors.

Sorry mate. You cant simplify it like this without an inherent understanding of exactly how it operates.

FYI, I am doing a Cyber security course right now and we have looked at hashing, salting, how it works, and that it is very much a one way function involving private and public keys. 

As for my trust in bitcoin, I have none, I am/have purchasing/purchased none, and quantum computing, will render it worthless, because what takes years to create on the blockchain, will take minutes to solve on a quantum computer.

Have a go at this for a bit and think about what I am saying.

http://nmichaels.org/rsa.py