Can Google's new quantum chip Willow destroy the value of Bitcoin?

Foresight News What? It may be Satoshi Nakamoto's wallet that is under threat. Author: ChandlerZ, Foresight News Cover: Photo by Tareq Ajalyakin on Unsplash On December 10, Google announced the launch of its latest quantum computing chip Willow, which the company claims has 105 quantum Bits (qubit, the unit of quantum information) and achieves best-in-class performance in quantum error correction and random circuit sampling. With the increase in the number of qubits, Willow's new breakthroughs can reduce errors exponentially. In the RCS benchmark test, the Willow chip completed a standard calculation in less than 5 minutes, while for the fastest supercomputer today, this calculation would take more than 10^25 years, which Hartmut Neven, head of Google Quantum AI, said exceeds the known timescales of physics and greatly exceeds the age of the universe. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, stated that Willow is an important step in the tech giant's efforts to build a "useful quantum computer" that will have practical applications in drug discovery, fusion energy, and battery design. Community Discussion Resumes However, the community's previous concerns about quantum computing have resurfaced - does the Willow chip have the capability to crack the Bitcoin encryption algorithm? Bitcoin relies on Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) and the SHA-256 hash algorithm to ensure the security of its network, and quantum computing is theoretically believed to have the ability to crack private keys through algorithmic advantages. Whether Willow's powerful performance will undermine the security foundation of Bitcoin, or even destroy the value of this asset, has become a focus of attention for the market and the technical community. ECDSA is the digital signature algorithm used in Bitcoin to protect private keys and verify transactions, and SHA-256 is the hash algorithm that ensures data integrity, which is crucial to Bitcoin's proof-of-work mechanism and is used to create encrypted hashes in mining. While Willow represents a major breakthrough in quantum technology, its 105 qubits are far from the number of qubits required to crack Bitcoin's encryption algorithms. Bitcoin entrepreneur Ben Sigman points out that ECDSA is vulnerable to Shor's algorithm and would require millions of physical qubits to crack, while SHA-256 would require breaking through billions of qubits via Grover's algorithm to pose a serious threat. He explains: "If a quantum computer could compute SHA256 hashes faster than the current global mining hashrate (750 exahash)... Assuming it could mine a block per minute. In just 33 hours, it would have mined 6,300 Bitcoins. Then the difficulty would readjust back to the 10 minute target. That same quantum computer would now take 2 weeks to mine 2000 blocks - the same as before it showed up. This is Satoshi's design. Bitcoin will automatically adapt." Former Google senior product manager Kevin Rose also wrote that "to crack Bitcoin's encryption algorithm, you need a quantum computer with about 13 million qubits to complete the decryption in 24 hours, while the Willow chip only has 105 qubits, and we still have a long way to go." Avalanche founder Emin Gün Sirer further explained in a tweet that while the latest advances in quantum computing are impressive, they do not pose a threat to the security of crypto assets, at least not yet. Quantum computing will make some operations (such as factorization) easier, while others (such as inverting one-way hash functions) remain just as difficult. Additionally, depending on the platform, the attack window for quantum computers is very small. These two facts make it quite difficult for quantum attackers. The design of Bitcoin and Avalanche X/P Chain systems ensures that when Alice sends funds to Bob, Bob's public key is not revealed to the public. Instead, the world only knows the hash of the public key (and thus, two independent one-way hash functions). This means that stationary funds have quantum resistance - the attacker has no information to exploit, and cannot lurk in the background. The public key is only exposed when a transaction is issued. Therefore, the quantum attacker only has a brief window of opportunity after seeing the public key in the transaction, but before the transaction is incorporated into the chain. The faster the chain, the harder the problem.

Foresight News However, Emin Gün Sirer provided some warnings from another angle, stating that there is a more urgent issue regarding the estimated 1.1 million BTC held by Satoshi Nakamoto. The early Bit mined by Satoshi used a very old Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK) format, which reveals the public key and gives attackers time to crack it, the source of all cryptographic bounties. Therefore, as the threat of Quantum Computing (QC) grows, the Bit community may want to consider freezing Satoshi's funds, or more broadly, providing a sunset date and freezing all funds in P2PK UTXOs. On the other hand, David Marcus, the co-founder and CEO of Lightspark (former President of PayPal and Head of Crypto at Meta), wrote that "most people don't fully understand the significance of this breakthrough." In response to Willow's question about what Blockchain means, David said "it means that quantum cryptography and cryptography need to start taking action to further develop," which was endorsed by Musk. ## Lattice Cryptography: The Game of Quantum-Resistant As quantum computing is developing rapidly, quantum-secure cryptography is also progressing in parallel. Among them, Lattice-based Cryptography, or "Lattice Cryptography," is gradually becoming a representative quantum-resistant encryption technology. Lattices are vector spaces generated by integer coefficients, which can be understood as a high-dimensional grid structure. The security of Lattice Cryptography relies on two classic "Lattice Hard Problems": the Shortest Vector Problem and the Closest Vector Problem. The complexity of solving these problems grows exponentially with the dimension, and even in a quantum computing environment, there is no efficient polynomial-time algorithm. Therefore, Lattice Cryptography is considered an effective means to counter the threat of quantum computing. The Lattice Hard Problems can be seen as an extremely complex mathematical problem of finding solutions in high-dimensional space. Simply put, it involves finding the shortest path (Shortest Vector Problem) or the closest distance (Closest Vector Problem) between specific points in a lattice structure. This problem is relatively intuitive in low-dimensional spaces, such as finding the nearest point to a given point on a two-dimensional plane, but becomes exceptionally complex as the dimension increases. Similar to the Discrete Logarithm Problem in Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), Lattice Cryptography utilizes the computational difficulty of Lattice Hard Problems. In ECC, traditional computers cannot derive the private key from the public key; in Lattice Cryptography, even quantum computers cannot derive the private key from the public key, providing a solid guarantee for encryption in the quantum computing era. However, Satoshi Nakamoto had previously foreseen this problem and proposed a solution, "I think if SHA-256 was cracked, we could have a soft fork to a new hash, lock it down, and continue from a new hash from the honest block chain that everyone agrees on." "If the hash value gradually declines, we can transition to the new hash value in an orderly manner. The software will be programmed to start using the new hash value after a certain block number. By then, everyone must upgrade. The software can save the new hash values of all old blocks to ensure that blocks with the same old hash values cannot be used."