Skip to main content
3 of 7
added 14 characters in body
bca-0353f40e
  • 1.2k
  • 3
  • 18

There has been some literature discussing this and a migration strategy:

The 2nd referenced paper describes a commit-reveal scheme that would avoid having your funds stolen when you want to migrate them to some new, quantum-resistant address.

The new addresses would pretty much look the same: a string of characters, with maybe few bits of difference in starting characters to encode the use of some new scheme. If collision resistance is required they'd also have to be a little longer (384 bits). Quantum preimage resistance is already achieved with SegWit 256-bit addresses (even though the underlying key is vulnerable).

So addresses wouldn't be affected much. However, transactions would get much bigger, since the input script would then have to include a bigger public key and signature. For example, SPHINICS uses 1KB keys and 41KB signatures so in that case the address would have to be about 7 times longer and signature about 645 times longer! Good news is that with SegWit it wouldn't count against the "hard" blocksize limit, and that data could be later pruned.

bca-0353f40e
  • 1.2k
  • 3
  • 18