"Why Bitcoin down, sir?” "Did you hear of a new quantum chip ready to crack crypto encryption?” Google's announcement of a breakthrough quantum processor has ignited fresh discussions on cryptocurrency security, with some experts warning that quantum computers could compromise Bitcoin's encryption.
On Monday, Google unveiled a new quantum computing chip called Willow. The Google Quantum AI team asserts that this chip can solve a benchmark computational problem in under five minutes — a task that would take the most advanced supercomputer approximately 10 septillion years, far surpassing the age of the universe.
Willow's main advantage, however, lies in error reduction, not raw speed. Developers claim they cut error rates so the system maintains stability as qubit count grows—a challenge that stumped quantum researchers for almost 30 years.
“Google’s advancement in quantum computing with Willow puts the likelihood of companies using quantum computers for business in the next two to three years.” (Dr. Erik Garcell for Decrypt)
Quantum computing is often considered a direct threat to blockchain security, as these machines can potentially crack commonly used encryption schemes — such as RSA — in hours instead of centuries. In theory, truly powerful quantum computers may threaten all our digital security foundations, exposing everything from personal passwords to nuclear launch codes, as almost any encrypted system could be unlocked by brute-forcing combinations of numbers and letters.
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But it is not completely grim. Quantum computing may threaten current security, but it’s no universal master key—at least not yet. Bitcoin remains unthreatened for now.
The short answer is current quantum computers, including Google's Willow, aren't strong enough to break common encryption methods like RSA, ECC (used in Bitcoin transactions), or AES (used to protect data). To break these security systems, quantum computers would need to be much more powerful — with millions or billions of qubits (quantum bits) that work almost perfectly. Today's quantum computers are nowhere near this level of power.
A potential concern, however, is that many of the oldest bitcoins in circulation—including those in Satoshi's balance—use an outdated encryption standard no longer used in modern wallets and systems. These potentially vulnerable bitcoins reportedly make up more than 20% of the total supply.
(Source: Deloitte)
"In the graph we see that the number of Bitcoins stored in reused p2pkh increases from 2010 to 2014, and since then is decreasing slowly to reach the current amount of 2.5M Bitcoins. This suggests that people are generally following the best practice of not using p2pk address as well as not reusing p2pkh addresses. Nevertheless, there are still over 4 million BTC (about 25% of all Bitcoins) which are potentially vulnerable to a quantum attack.” (Deloitte, "Quantum computers and the Bitcoin blockchain")
One pretty obvious solution is the theoretical possibility of updating the network to freeze Satoshi's coins. This would prevent anyone using quantum computing to crack Nakamoto's wallets from moving or selling the Bitcoin inside. Yet, achieving consensus on this in the Bitcoin network is uncertain, which is not necessarily bad since a more elegant solution can likely be found.
Among other crypto developers, Vitalik Buterin has already proposed a way to mitigate the risk of quantum computing in Ethereum. As for him, a straightforward hard fork requiring users to update their wallet software could address this issue — at the end of the day, Ethereum is no stranger to hard forks.
“It's not true that quantum computers break all cryptography. They break some cryptographic algorithms. But for every cryptographic algorithm that quantum computers can break, we know that we have a replacement […] that quantum computers cannot break.” (Vitalik Buterin for SlamX)
Though still technically years away, it's worth noting that a quantum computer capable of breaking Bitcoin's cryptography would be the least of anyone's worries. If the most powerful computing network in the world could be compromised, nearly any digital system on the planet—from banking to nuclear codes—could face the same threat.
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