QUANTUM ALERT
Google REVEALS that breaking crypto encryption would be 20 times EASIER
Is Bitcoin REALLY safe from "Quantum Winter"?
New research by Google's quantum AI scientist Craig Gidney has raised alarm bells in the crypto community by suggesting that breaking the widely used RSA encryption could require 20 times fewer quantum resources than previously estimated.
Although the study did not directly mention #bitcoin , its findings impact the encryption methods that protect cryptocurrency wallets and, in some cases, transactions.
Reduced Quantum Threat: Gidney estimates that a 2048-bit RSA number could be factored in less than a week by a quantum computer with fewer than 1 million noisy qubits, a drastic reduction from his 2019 estimate of 20 million qubits.
Impact on RSA and ECC: RSA is a public-key encryption algorithm. While Bitcoin does not use RSA, but rather elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), the latter is also vulnerable to Shor's algorithm, a quantum algorithm designed to break public-key cryptography.
Nonlinear Vulnerability: 256-bit ECC keys are more secure than 2048-bit RSA keys, but the quantum threat scales nonlinearly, meaning the timeframe for these attacks to become feasible could be compressed.
No Immediate Risk: It's crucial to note that there is no quantum computer capable of performing this feat yet. IBM's most powerful quantum processor has just over 1,100 qubits, and Google's has 53, far from the million needed.
Not an Immediate Threat, but Requires Attention: Although Bitcoin is not in danger today, Gidney's findings shorten the timeframe in which quantum computing could become a real threat. This reinforces the need to research and develop post-quantum cryptography (PQC) solutions.