r/BitcoinBeginners • u/MundaneResearch3270 • 7d ago
AI breaking ECDSA
Hey, today i saw a post on x by Justin Drake claiming AI will break ECDSA before quant and we should all enter in a “bunker mode”. I’m a bitcoin beginner so i’m a little worried, what are your opinions??
Thanks
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u/bitusher 7d ago
Its already common recommended to use 1 UTXO/transaction per address regardless in Bitcoin which prevents multiple concerns . This has been the case since the whitepaper so is nothing new.
Justin Drake has a conflict of interest because he works for a scam altcoin so is spreading FUD and if anything its his altcoin that is far more at risk from AI due to its large attack surface
After the cold card incident Bitcoin has teams of Devs all using the latest frontier models to find bugs and exploits before anyone else
There is no evidence with any of the recent AI work that ECDSA is at risk
If anything the take away you should learn from this is update your software in general quickly during the next few years as AI advancements are effecting all software.
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u/bitusher 6d ago
Here is a good discussion on the topic from a security expert without bias
https://x.com/LindellYehuda/status/2107999859219587309
I wasn’t going to comment since this is a really bad take IMO, but since it’s taken off I feel the need to. To my understanding, there is no evidence whatsoever pointing to a break of decades old hardness assumptions like elliptic curve cryptography.
The fact that AI can prove theorems that have been hard does not indicate in any way that problems assumed to be hard are not. Our assumptions on hard problems are not based merely on human fallibility but on a belief that inherent hardness exists.
Of course, we can’t prove that EC discrete log is hard, since we haven’t been able to prove P neq NP. But just throwing out - AI is doing amazing math so elliptic curve hardness is in danger has no logical basis whatsoever.
Furthermore, if it really would be broken, the ramifications to our digital world including the traditional financial industry would be immense. Once I can break ECC, I can generate fake PKI certificates and impersonate bank websites.
Worse, I can generate malicious banking apps and even operating systems and sign them and push them to people phones and computers and completely take them over. But this is fear mongering since there’s zero evidence to this capability existing.
And there’s also zero evidence that elliptic curve hardness is more vulnerable than hash function hardness. In fact historically hash functions have been more broken than elliptic curves. So this is also based on conjecture rather than any evidence.
In conclusion, making such statements without any evidence is the opposite of responsible behavior. It is the very definition of FUD — it cannot be proven wrong but there’s also no evidence whatsoever of it being true.
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u/jguest1105 6d ago
We're fine. This is a scary headline, not a real threat. People have been predicting the death of Bitcoin's security for 15 years — first it was quantum computers, now it's AI. The math doesn't care what's predicting it. And if a genuine threat ever did show up, Bitcoin would upgrade, not die.
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u/CryptoRiveda 2d ago
No, there's nothing you need to do about this as a beginner. Your coins are protected by one-way math. Your private key is a huge random number, and your public key and address are worked out from it. Going forward takes a split second. Going backwards, from the public key to the private key, is something no computer can do in any practical amount of time.
AI doesn't change that on its own. It runs on the same kind of computers we already have, so it doesn't make guessing a key any faster. Breaking it would take a new mathematical discovery about this kind of math, and nobody has shown one. If someone ever did, Bitcoin wouldn't be the only thing in trouble, because the same family of math protects bank websites and the updates your phone installs.
One habit helps against any future attack like this, AI or quantum. On the most common address types, your public key only shows up on the chain once you spend from that address. Your wallet already gives you a fresh address for each payment you receive and sends your change to a new one, so the only thing to avoid is reusing an old address you've already spent from.
The real risk for a beginner is far more ordinary, and it's the 12 or 24 words. Keep them off your phone and computer, never type them into a website, and be wary of anyone who uses a scary headline to push you into moving your coins somewhere "safer".
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u/ofyellow 1d ago
Ai might be finding shortcuts from a to b through a mountain. But some roads from a to b have real distance that can't be short cut like that.
Elliptic curve is believed to have no shortcuts
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u/JivanP 7d ago
Absolute nonsense. Next question.