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What needs to be changed in Bitcoin if SHA-256 is broken?

Bitcoin Stack Exchange

Bitcoin News / Bitcoin Stack Exchange 161 Views

I come up with a little bit "catastrophical“ question. I declare that I understand the degree of improbability of such a scenario in our lifetime, but I would still be interested in your opinion. I'm not afraid of a quantum computer breaking ECDSA as there will be possibly ways to soft fork a new signature scheme and move at least the non-lost coins to these addresses and SHA-256 would still be OK, but of any weakness in SHA-256.

Let's say we know that SHA-256 is weakened in more ways (collisions/preimage/second preimage) and will become risky to use within 10 years. Let's say we have a replacement in the form of, for example, SHA-3.

How critical do you think the situation would be for Bitcoin? Not particulary concerned about PoW at the moment but my question is actually what would have to be upgraded in Bitcoin besides mining - merkle trees, block headers, transaction hashes, etc.? How hard would be to migrate these parts of Bitcoin? And what about the scripts - would the users need to move all their coins? What would happen to all the lost UTXOs in e.g. P2SH?

I know we probably won't have to deal with such a matter, but again, in theory, I would like to know how you think about a similar emergency scenario.

Thanks!


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