What does it take to break Bitcoin’s encryption? | The Backend Engineering Show

I stumbled upon a research calculating how big of quantum computer required to break bitcoin public key encryption. It will take them 300 million quantum bits to find the corresponding private key given a public key. That wasn’t really the most instructive thing really from that research. The interesting thing is how bitcoin design carefully hides information about the original owner which makes breaking it really challenging.

In this episode I discuss what does it take to break bitcoin encryption.

0:00 Intro
3:00 Public Key Cryptography
6:30 Bitcoin Keys ( Private key/public key and bitcoin address)
8:18 Why do we need a Bitcoin address
11:13 How minors verify transactions
17:30 When is the bitcoin public key visible?
19:12 The Wallet
20:47 What does it take to break bitcoin?

-obtain public key from digital sign during a transaction posting. If someone used that public key , obtained the private key, then used it to generate a new ransaction to a different address before this transaction get posted.
-have a bitcoin address in mine satoshi, find out the public key not possible, then find out the private key from the public key, you can take all the time you need here. Because once you find those puppiest you are off to the races

25:20 Bits of security
28:00 My thoughts

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Stay Awesome,
Hussein

[raffayhussain]

I just love this channel. I like how you keep making non clickbait-y smart videos.

[Coding_knight]

You articulated well about the use case thing, that most find difficulty in. Good job sir!

[gthman]

A masterclass as always, thanks for the in depth lessons about cryptography.
As someone who has a background in Finance, let me tell you "Everything that has value, consumes energy" that's why Proof of Work makes sense to me, the paper money you hold in your pocket consumed energy from the cotton harvested to the ink pouring out of the printers, to the banks paying the electricity bill.

[guitarheroprince]

FYI - Miners don't verify signatures/transactions. Full nodes do. Those nodes can run on a raspberry pi.

[이경-fy]

Hussein I have been watching a lot of your videos for a long time. And I am very glad that you have finally been orange pilled haha. I feel backend engineers have the highest affinity to truly appreciate Bitcoin's design.

[zaheeruddinfaiz]

Hussian, I think you misspelled the miner in 5th chapter. It says "How minors ...". It should be "How miners ...".
Thank you making this video :)

[andydataguy]

Great video! I love the way that you share your thoughts. Thanks for sharing! 🙌🏾

[chebrubin]

Just joined

I am glad a techie without some bias is presenting a high-level evaluation.

[matinzd]

29:10 Bitcoin is using something called version bit in block to verify the previous transactions as well as minor transactions.

[benb.]

You're doing the lord's work Hussein!

[siya.abc]

This is the best Channel on YouTube. Thanks bro

[johnconnor]

I can't remember all the contextually specific technical stuff about bitcoin, but from a distribution theory perspective, I know that POW is used to keep the system in a byzantine fault tolerant state (byzantine generals problem). In the lifespan of a blockchain distributed ledger, it eventually will reach a state where it become 'practically' impossible for a 'treacherous general' to introduce an adjacent near identical ledger, with a fraudulently altered block; invalidating the system as a whole - which is the valid ledger? POW is also used to prevent sybil attacks by implicitly imposing an economic expense (mining) during the on-boarding process, preventing spamming of fraudulent identifies in a open registration system. My question is, is it possible to change the encryption algorithm to a quantum-safe crypto algorithm mid-flight? Without invalidating all past transactions? Nice video.

[ameyjain]

How do you get time to dive into so many aspects/topics and still manage full time job. Great work!

[flearock]

One problem it solves is the gov cant freeze your transactions as the Canadian gov is currently attempting.

[IgorRoztr]

Hey Hussein, love your analysis, but I don't agree with your opinion on Proof Of Work. It is inneficient and requires lots of energy on purpose. It is a feature, not a bug. To understand why, you need to study austrian economics. I recommend you "Bitcoin Standard" by Saifedean Ammous, and if you don't have a time, he was on Lex Fridman Podcast😉

[mba]

plz, more video about blockchain, thanks hussein.

[gourabpaul]

The last part really hit home. People are really trying to use this technology to solve a problem which either don't exist or is very niche. Love this show, keep up the good work.

[Jasszzz]

If I am not mistaken, operating a super quantum computer to bring in a fake transaction by getting a private key will also fail because the consensus algorithm will not allow it to do so

[dejfcold]

I have an issue with the statement that proof of work essentially throws away the rest of the computation power when only one computing unit wins. I guess it ultimately depends on how you see it, but the way I see it, is that the "wasted" resources might not be directly producing anything of value, but they indirectly increase the security of the blockchain itself, which is of some value IMO.

Obviously, it would be nice if it did provide some value directly, but afaik we don't know how.

[aymanpatel]

Please do a full video on Zero knowledge proof.