Researchers just cut the estimated quantum-computing cost to attack Bitcoin and Ethereum's encryption by more than 50% -- and no machine on Earth can actually do it yet.
The news: a collaborative effort (100+ contributors, including teams from the Ethereum Foundation, Theta Labs, and StarkWare) designed a new quantum circuit needing 1,151 logical qubits and about 1.3 million Toffoli gates to perform the core arithmetic step in breaking the elliptic-curve cryptography (secp256k1) that secures both Bitcoin and Ethereum private keys. The combined resource score came to roughly 1.5 billion -- more than 50% below the ~3 billion benchmark Google Quantum AI published in March, and an 86% drop from where an open research challenge started just two months ago.
The catch: today's quantum hardware has only ~1,000-1,200 physical qubits and logical-qubit counts in the tens or low hundreds -- nowhere close to running this. This is a benchmark for a theoretical future attack, not a live threat, and remediation (protocol upgrades, wallet migrations to quantum-resistant signatures) has years of runway to happen before hardware could plausibly catch up. Progress like this tends to come in irregular jumps, not a steady countdown clock.
Why it still matters: roughly 7 million BTC sit in addresses where the public key is already exposed on-chain -- those are the coins most at risk whenever "Q-Day" eventually arrives, and industry-wide migration to quantum-resistant wallets takes years to roll out even once the tech exists. Research like this is exactly what should be driving that migration timeline, not a sudden hardware breakthrough nobody saw coming.
Does a 50%+ cut in the theoretical attack cost change your view on how urgent quantum-resistant wallet migration actually is?
Not financial advice. DYOR.
$BTC $ETH #CryptoNews #Quantum #Security
The news: a collaborative effort (100+ contributors, including teams from the Ethereum Foundation, Theta Labs, and StarkWare) designed a new quantum circuit needing 1,151 logical qubits and about 1.3 million Toffoli gates to perform the core arithmetic step in breaking the elliptic-curve cryptography (secp256k1) that secures both Bitcoin and Ethereum private keys. The combined resource score came to roughly 1.5 billion -- more than 50% below the ~3 billion benchmark Google Quantum AI published in March, and an 86% drop from where an open research challenge started just two months ago.
The catch: today's quantum hardware has only ~1,000-1,200 physical qubits and logical-qubit counts in the tens or low hundreds -- nowhere close to running this. This is a benchmark for a theoretical future attack, not a live threat, and remediation (protocol upgrades, wallet migrations to quantum-resistant signatures) has years of runway to happen before hardware could plausibly catch up. Progress like this tends to come in irregular jumps, not a steady countdown clock.
Why it still matters: roughly 7 million BTC sit in addresses where the public key is already exposed on-chain -- those are the coins most at risk whenever "Q-Day" eventually arrives, and industry-wide migration to quantum-resistant wallets takes years to roll out even once the tech exists. Research like this is exactly what should be driving that migration timeline, not a sudden hardware breakthrough nobody saw coming.
Does a 50%+ cut in the theoretical attack cost change your view on how urgent quantum-resistant wallet migration actually is?
Not financial advice. DYOR.
$BTC $ETH #CryptoNews #Quantum #Security
