Threats and Opportunities: Blockchain Meets Quantum Computation
This addresses security vulnerabilities in blockchain systems for users and developers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing quantum and blockchain concepts.
The paper examines how quantum computation threatens blockchain by accelerating nonce generation, hash collision searches, and breaking classical encryption, while also showing that integrating quantum properties like QKD and DBA can enhance blockchain security and efficiency.
This article considered deficiencies of the flourishing blockchain technology manifested by the development of quantum computation. We show that the future blockchain technology would under constant threats from the following aspects: 1) Speed up the generation of nonces; 2) Faster searching for hash collisions; 3) Break the security of the classical encryption. We also demonstrate that incorporating some quantum properties into blockchain makes it more robust and more efficient. For example people can establish a quantum-security blockchain system that utilizes quantum key distribution (QKD), and quantum synchronization and detectable Byzantine agreement (DBA) can help the blockchain systems achieve faster consensus even if there exist a number of malicious nodes.