500,000 machines become 30,000: The barrier to cracking Bitcoin private keys has been slashed 17-fold 🦖
🔭 进群看资金去哪
On October 29, quantum computing company Alice & Bob released a new model.
A machine with about 29,588 physical qubits could use Shor’s algorithm to derive a private key from a public key in just 62 minutes.
Google’s estimate in March this year was 500,000 qubits.
The new figure brings that number down to one-seventeenth.
When the news broke, Bitcoin was hovering around $80,000, down 0.67% on the day.
A timeline for when computing power might catch up with encryption was suddenly dragged much closer ⚠️
First, let’s translate the technology into plain English.
Bitcoin’s security is based on the fact that knowing a public key still doesn’t let you calculate the private key.
If a quantum computer runs fast enough, it can work backward from a public key to derive the private key.
Sixty-two minutes sounds like a long time, since Bitcoin produces a block every 10 minutes on average.
For a transaction still waiting to be confirmed, that speed really wouldn’t be fast enough.
But for another category of coins, timing isn’t a problem at all.
More than 6 million bitcoins sit in addresses whose public keys have already been exposed.
There’s no need to wait for a transaction to be confirmed with these addresses. An attacker can take their time calculating—and the day they crack it is the day they can take the coins 🔐
What’s really worth watching isn’t whether coins will be stolen tomorrow,
but how long migration will take.
Alice & Bob senior cryptanalyst Dahmun Goudarzi put it plainly:
Migration has to start now. The industry knows how difficult and lengthy this will be.
There’s another line in the same study that deserves even more attention.
He says this architecture has no lower limit.
That means future research could keep lowering the barrier, potentially even approaching the 9-minute version in Google’s model.
They also believe hardware advances and declining resource requirements will converge in the early 2030s.
On one side, there may be only five or six years left in the window. On the other, changing signature algorithms across decentralized networks is an undertaking that can take years.
It’s the collision of these two timelines that gives this paper its real weight 🧊
My take:
Today’s pullback was driven by the Fed’s hawkish stance and tech companies’ earnings reports—not quantum computing.
But quantum is the kind of risk people ignore until something happens and it’s too late.
It won’t make Bitcoin go to zero tomorrow, but at some point it could suddenly become a mandatory question on institutional due diligence checklists.
Here are three things to watch next:
Will dormant coins in old addresses start moving?
When will mainstream wallets and custodians make quantum-resistant signatures a default option?
Will discussions at the protocol level move from research to scheduling? 👀
How many times have you used an address in your wallet before switching to a new one?
Do you think Bitcoin should start switching to quantum-resistant signatures now, or wait a little longer?
Let’s talk in the comments.
Every day, I bring you the latest Bitcoin news—not just what’s happening, but also the logic and opportunities behind it 👀🚀
🔭 进群看资金去哪
On October 29, quantum computing company Alice & Bob released a new model.
A machine with about 29,588 physical qubits could use Shor’s algorithm to derive a private key from a public key in just 62 minutes.
Google’s estimate in March this year was 500,000 qubits.
The new figure brings that number down to one-seventeenth.
When the news broke, Bitcoin was hovering around $80,000, down 0.67% on the day.
A timeline for when computing power might catch up with encryption was suddenly dragged much closer ⚠️
First, let’s translate the technology into plain English.
Bitcoin’s security is based on the fact that knowing a public key still doesn’t let you calculate the private key.
If a quantum computer runs fast enough, it can work backward from a public key to derive the private key.
Sixty-two minutes sounds like a long time, since Bitcoin produces a block every 10 minutes on average.
For a transaction still waiting to be confirmed, that speed really wouldn’t be fast enough.
But for another category of coins, timing isn’t a problem at all.
More than 6 million bitcoins sit in addresses whose public keys have already been exposed.
There’s no need to wait for a transaction to be confirmed with these addresses. An attacker can take their time calculating—and the day they crack it is the day they can take the coins 🔐
What’s really worth watching isn’t whether coins will be stolen tomorrow,
but how long migration will take.
Alice & Bob senior cryptanalyst Dahmun Goudarzi put it plainly:
Migration has to start now. The industry knows how difficult and lengthy this will be.
There’s another line in the same study that deserves even more attention.
He says this architecture has no lower limit.
That means future research could keep lowering the barrier, potentially even approaching the 9-minute version in Google’s model.
They also believe hardware advances and declining resource requirements will converge in the early 2030s.
On one side, there may be only five or six years left in the window. On the other, changing signature algorithms across decentralized networks is an undertaking that can take years.
It’s the collision of these two timelines that gives this paper its real weight 🧊
My take:
Today’s pullback was driven by the Fed’s hawkish stance and tech companies’ earnings reports—not quantum computing.
But quantum is the kind of risk people ignore until something happens and it’s too late.
It won’t make Bitcoin go to zero tomorrow, but at some point it could suddenly become a mandatory question on institutional due diligence checklists.
Here are three things to watch next:
Will dormant coins in old addresses start moving?
When will mainstream wallets and custodians make quantum-resistant signatures a default option?
Will discussions at the protocol level move from research to scheduling? 👀
How many times have you used an address in your wallet before switching to a new one?
Do you think Bitcoin should start switching to quantum-resistant signatures now, or wait a little longer?
Let’s talk in the comments.
Every day, I bring you the latest Bitcoin news—not just what’s happening, but also the logic and opportunities behind it 👀🚀
