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I suppose the "at least" is a minimum.
I think that elliptic curve cryptography was invented in the 1980s (Wikipedia), so 75 years ago is well before that. I imagine the rate of change has picked up a bit, so it seems highly likely that the cryptography we use in bitcoin (or perhaps any current cryptography) will be much less secure in 75 years than it is now.
So if you bury it like pirate treasure, the problem is that the blockchain is never buried. And as vulnerabilities are exposed (or computing capabilities increase) it's likely that people will be treasure hunting long before you have a chance to unearth your coffee can.
75 years
The current normie consensus for high value keys (anything that touches money as a derivation key) is 1-2 years, and for high usage keys, expire sooner. This is currently the standard for both PSD2 and P2PE payment terminals, and note that this is for a BDK or an org-wide key (i.e. the key on a single device/deployment from which transaction keys are derived) so this would correspond to at the very least the hardened account key that you extpub'd from your hardware wallet (and if you don't have that, basically your entire master key / seed phrase.) Also note that in tradfi payments, each transactional key gets hardened (like how the Bitcoin Core wallet does it, so no usage of extpubs.)
I don't know anything that aims for 75 years of security, and I wouldn't expect anyone to insure any cryptographic secret for that long because of that. The world changes too rapidly for this anyway.
1-2 years is surprisingly short! What would you think is a reasonable time for a holder of bitcoin to feel confident that they don't need to pay attention to upgrading their key?
Or is it kind of foolish to think like that anyway? Should bitcoiners just get used to the idea of rolling their stash to new keys every year or so?
tbh, I would find this a little frustrating. Using a multisig with distributed keys gets a lot more cumbersome all of a suddon.
although, there is an argument, that such a setup should be test spending once a year anyway.
I'd base it off of transaction frequency. For my hot wallet I do it 1-2 years. For cold, I'd say 5-7 years assuming it's truly cold and you don't spend from it, or at least no more than once/twice a year. I personally never made it to 5 years till now though, but if I'd make it that far, I'd probably force myself to do that.
You anyway need to ensure sometimes that your recovery process still works; you're not doing the ecdsa in your head so you need hardware, software, a chain.. all that (or if you actually can do it in your head, why are you posting on SN and not in some basement decrypting shit for a 3LA)
I see. So it's more a function of how frequently you are using keys or children of the keys to sign and posting those signatures publicly (say, on a blockchain) than it has to do with the algorithm itself being cracked.
If that's the case, this is not something that gets talked about in bitcoin very often.
Yes, but as the risk of lost keys is definitely the highest risk, you want to have a process for this that you exercise. Not something that after 20 years you find out doesn't work (or got flooded, lost in a fire, stolen, otherwise destroyed) and it was your last copy on a piece of paper... I'm saying this from first hand experience. Rolling over (or at least rolling forward) is a good practice and if you do it on your hot wallet you'll be more comfortable and have less immediate risk.
I'd say the risk of, without any other error, someone attacking your key through magic quantum computers in a cluster the size of Jupiter is a lot smaller than you losing your keys. The chance that your wallet implementation is bad, is much larger. The chance that your metal seed vault thing gets stolen, is larger.
And the impact, on a personal level, for all these is exactly the same: you lost your coin.
"Bitcoin should enable a person to self-custody coins for at least one human lifetime, ~75 years. Someone should be able to bury an HD Seed in a coffee can and then dig it up in 75 years and spend those coins.
and that"
Why only 75 years. Why can't I bury it and have it found centuries later like pirate treasure.