We are pleased to announce the release of Emercoin 0.8.5. This update brings several bugfixes and improvements; upgrading is desirable but not required.
The headline feature is quantum attack protection for PoS/PoW blocks. Until now, the Proof-of-Stake minting algorithm used a P2PK transaction output, which exposes the public key needed to validate a block's signature. The cryptography in use is secure today and for the foreseeable future, but a sufficiently powerful quantum computer (on the order of hundreds of millions of qubits) could in theory derive a private key from a known public key via Shor's algorithm.
Starting with this version, the main portion of a PoS minting amount is sent to a fresh, previously unused P2WPKH output, publishing only a 160-bit hash of the public key instead of the key itself. Such a hash cannot be broken by Shor's algorithm, and brute-forcing it with Grover's algorithm would take billions of years — keeping the bulk of the minting amount safe. A small amount still goes to the P2PK address required for signature verification, making a quantum attack economically pointless.
The mechanism is disabled by default. To enable it, add the following line to
your emercoin.conf: quantprotection=100.0.
This release also introduces signed DNS zones (enumtrust) in EmerDNS — a privileged zone type where the resolver returns only DNS records signed by a trusted verifier — along with additional bugfixes.
Full release notes and downloads: Emercoin 0.8.5 on GitHub.
