On Monday, two research pieces about quantum cryptography dramatically slashed the hardware requirements for cracking private keys to vast sums of digital assets, including over a million bitcoin ($BTC) owned by Satoshi Nakamoto. By some estimates, the deadline to fork Bitcoin to post-quantum cryptography has accelerated by two orders of magnitude.
In other words, both research teams described multiplicative, not additive, advancements to quantum computing. Although the two teams approached different layers of the quantum stack, their improvements compound.
To summarize in brief, the number of physical qubits required to crack the elliptic curve signatures protecting the private keys of exposed $BTC public keys has collapsed from roughly 9 million to as few as 10,000.
Google Quantum AI’s whitepaper, co-authored with Stanford researcher Dan Boneh and Ethereum Foundation’s Justin Drake, showed that fewer than 1,200 logical qubits and 90 million Toffoli gates using Shor’s algorithm might be able to solve the Bitcoin protocol’s 256-bit Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP). On a superconducting quantum computer, that translates to fewer than 500,000 physical qubits, executing in minutes. Google called the result a 20-fold reduction over prior estimates.
Hours later, Oratomic, founded by Caltech and Harvard faculty, released its own breakthrough. Using new error-correcting tactics on ‘neutral atom’ quantum hardware, this team showed Shor’s algorithm running at private key-breaking speed with as few as 10,000 physical qubits. A faster variant using 26,000 qubits could crack a $BTC private key using only its public key within roughly 10 days.
Google’s quantum computer could break Bitcoin in two ways
