Author: Leandro Coutinho 2017-02-25 23:09:18
Published on: 2017-02-25T23:09:18+00:00
The computational cost of attacking Bitcoin could be reduced if people split their bitcoins into multiple addresses. Google recently announced the first SHA1 collision attack, which involved nine quintillion SHA1 computations in total, taking 6,500 years of CPU computation to complete the first phase and 110 years of GPU computation to complete the second phase. In comparison, the richest Bitcoin address contains 124,178 BTC ($142,853,079 USD). In a discussion on the bitcoin-dev mailing list, Peter Todd argued that it is important to expose potential attacks so that people can develop mitigations, even if the computational costs of such attacks limit their real-world impact. He suggested deploying segwit's 256-bit digests as a response, which is already fully coded and ready to deploy, with the exception of a new address format being actively worked on.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T21:50:22.623844+00:00