It Might Actually Be 20 Times Easier for Quantum Computers to Break Bitcoin, Google Says

Google has just dropped a new one research paperAnd Bitcoin Maxis may want to do mathematics quickly. The tech giant’s quantum team discovered that breaking the RSA coding that protects everything from your bank account to your Bitcoin portion, possibly needs 20 times fewer quantum sources than previously estimated.

“Planning the transition to quantum-proof crypto systems requires understanding the costs of quantum attacks on vulnerable cryptosystems,” wrote Google Quantum researcher Craig Gidney. “In Gidney+Ekerå 2019 I have published an estimate stating that 2048 Bit RSA-HEGELE Numbers could be processed in eight hours by a quantum computer with 20 million noisy Qubits. In this article I considerably reduce the number of Qubits required.”

“I estimate that an RSA can be processed in less than a week by a quantum computer with less than a million noisy qubits,” Gidney argued.

“This is a 20-fold decrease in the number of quubits from our earlier estimate,” said the Google researcher in a Official blog post.

But it’s not like it will happen soon. For context, IBM’s Condor (the most powerful quantum computer so far) is on 1,121 Qubits While Google’s own sycamore runs at 53. So your coins are still safe – for now. The process is what matters, and it points in a direction that holds someone who holds crypto and let’s sit and pay attention.

The breakthrough, says Google, comes from two places: “Better algorithms and smarter error correction.” Researchers came up with the algoritic side how they can make calculations for modular exponentations – the heavy mathematical lifting in coding – twice as fast, while the error correction improvements are possible because the team by adding the density of the logical quubits room by adding a new layer of error correction in the same physical work.

They have also implemented something that is mentioned “Magic state“—Awen enough a trick to make special quantum ingredients (t -te -stands) stronger and more reliable, so that quantum computers can perform more complex tasks more efficiently without waste extra sources – to reduce the workspace required for basic quantum operations.

Why would Bitcoin holders care about quantum computers?

Bitcoin trusts elliptical curve cryptography, which works on similar mathematical principles such as RSA. If quantum computers can crack RSA faster than expected, the Bitcoin protection line has just been compressed. The 256-bit coding of the cryptocurrency is stronger than the older RSA tests that Google studied, but not as much as you could hope to deal with exponential scale.

And there are already experts who try to find ways to apply quantum technology to break Bitcoin.

As previously reported by DecryptProject 11, a research group for Quantum Computing, launched a Bitcoin Bounty worth almost $ 85,000 for anyone who can even break a simplified version of Bitcoin’s coding using a quantum computer. They test keys ranging from 1 to 25 bits-tiny compared to Bitcoin’s 256-bit coding, but it is about following the progress.

“Bitcoin’s security is based on elliptical curve cryptography. Quantum computers with the algorithm of Shor will ultimately break it,” wrote Project 11 when announcing their challenge. “We test how urgent the threat is.”

The security implications go beyond crypto. RSA and similar systems support Global Secure Communications, from banking to digital signatures. Google noted that opponents can already collect encrypted data to decode later as soon as quantum computers are available, so they prepare for this approaching future.

“Google has therefore switched traffic in both Chrome and internally and internally to the standardized version of ML-Kem as soon as it was available,” said Google.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology issued Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards last year and recommended to relate vulnerable systems after 2030. Google’s research suggests that the timeline may need acceleration.

IBM has plans for a quantum computer of 100,000 breeding in 2033, together with the University of Tokyo and the University of Chicago. Quantinuum is intended to deliver a fully false tolerant quantum computer By 2029. These goals suddenly look more important in view of the findings of Google.

Another thing to tackle is how much continuous runtime quantum machines support. The hypothetical machine for a million Bebit that Google describes should be carried out continuously for days, maintain extremely low error percentages and have to coordinate billions of operations without interruption. Current quantum computers can hardly maintain coherence Minutes – so again, don’t panic.

The quantum threat is not immediately, but it speeds up faster than expected. The crypto community has already started working on quantum-resistant solutions. Solana developers introduced a quantum-resistant safe with the help of hash-based signatures, while Ethereum proposed co-founder Vitalik Buterin to propose the current code block chains To protect against quantum threats.

So it seems more likely that we will see a kind of anti-quantum hard fork in the future before we witness the first quantum hack of the Bitcoin blockchain fingers crossed.