Google’s Quantum Threat to Bitcoin Security

Bitcoin (BTC) may have failed due to Google’s latest quantum computing processor. Some expressed that view as the internet behemoth unveiled its quantum supercomputer Willow on Monday. Willow can complete some computational tasks in five minutes, taking classical supercomputers an astronomical amount of time, more precisely, ten septillion years. “1 trillion,0,000,000,000”.

At 13.8 billion years, this duration exceeds the universe’s age. On the surface, such a powerful computer might compromise every security measure in place, including the ability to decrypt encrypted data, crack nuclear weapons codes, and open nearly any door via brute-force password attacks.

However, all is not yet bleak and hopeless. Although quantum computing presents serious challenges to existing security methods, it does not hold the key to the universe as of this writing. Further, Bitcoin is not in danger of any kind.

Quantum phenomena like entanglement and superposition allow qubits to represent both zeros and ones simultaneously, in contrast to bits that only represent ones or zeros. Because of this, quantum computers can execute numerous calculations simultaneously, which could one day solve issues that classical computers cannot handle.

Willow employs 105 qubits and exhibits an exponential drop in error with increasing qubit density. Google CEO Sundar Pichai says this is pivotal in developing a large-scale, functional quantum computer.

Cryptography techniques used by Bitcoin, such as SHA-256 for mining and ECDSA for signatures, could potentially be cracked by quantum computers. In a nutshell, no quantum computer, no matter how sophisticated (such as Google’s Willow), can decrypt popular algorithms like RSA, ECC (used in Bitcoin transactions), or AES (used in data security) in real-time due to their lack of processing power and error correction capabilities.

These encryption approaches could be broken, putting wallet security and transaction integrity at risk if quantum computers like Willow get large enough to factor in enormous numbers easily. Extremely low error rates exhibited by quantum computers with millions or even billions of “qubits” would be necessary for that, which is much beyond the capabilities of present-day technology.

“In their most recent quantum chip, Google asserts that they have shown “below threshold” error-correcting capabilities,” stated Chris Osborn, founder of the Dialect project in the Solana ecosystem, in an X post. “Below threshold” refers to converting physical qubits in the industry. noisy, crappy quantum bits—into “logical” qubits.

Multi-qubit abstractions that compensate for mistakes and enable genuine computation. Moreover, he stated. To execute Shor’s algorithm and decrypt data, around 5,000 logical qubits are required. That is to say, decryption requires “millions” of physical qubits. Osborn pointed out that Google’s processor currently contains 105 physical qubits.

Cryptocurrencies and other industries still have plenty of time to create algorithms resistant to quantum computing. Along with other industry heavyweights, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has been demanding new security protocols and resources for the age of quantum computing. Buterin stated in a technical blog post from October.

Experts in quantum computing, like Scott Aaronson, have recently begun to take the prospect of quantum computers functioning considerably more seriously in the medium term. “Every component of the Ethereum protocol that relies on elliptic curves now needs a hash-based.

Otherwise quantum-resistant replacement,” the statement read. “This has consequences across the entire Ethereum roadmap.” Google’s Quantum reasoned that we needed to be more proactive in developing alternatives that were resistant to quantum computing and that this justified conservative assumptions about the performance of proof-of-stake solutions.

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