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January 27, 2022

Quantum Computers Will Make Bitcoin Vulnerable in the Future, Researchers Say: Report

By Daily Hodl Staff

A team of quantum computing experts believes that the technology’s expanding capabilities will inevitably pose a threat to the security of Bitcoin (BTC).

In a new report, The Independent highlights research exploring the massive computational potential of quantum machines that could one day compromise the security of Bitcoin.

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The research team set out to determine how much quantum computing power would be required and calculated that such a feat could be achieved after magnitudes of technological gains.

Team leader Mark Webber said,

“State-of-the-art quantum computers today only have 50-100 qubits. Our estimated requirement of 30 [million] to 300 million physical qubits suggests Bitcoin should be considered safe from a quantum attack for now, but devices of this size are generally considered achievable, and future advancements may bring the requirements down further.”

A qubit is a quantum bit, the basic unit when calculating in a quantum system that’s comparable to the ones and zeroes of traditional binary computing.

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When going off of Webber’s estimates, quantum computing would have to increase 300,000 times on the low end and 6,000,000 times on the high end to breach Bitcoin’s security.

A more detailed breakdown appears in the paper’s abstract.

“We calculate the number of physical qubits which would be required to break the 256-bit elliptic curve encryption of keys in the Bitcoin network, within the small available time frame in which it would actually pose a threat to do so.

It would require approximately 317 million physical qubits to break the encryption within one hour using the surface code, a code cycle time of 1 ?s [millionth of a second], a reaction time of 10 ?s, and physical gate error of 10?3.

To break the encryption instead within one day it would require 13 million physical qubits.”

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The report concludes that while Bitcoin could mitigate the security risk by hard-forking into quantum encryption, the increased memory requirements would likely affect the network’s overall efficiency.

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