Bitcoin Isn’t Broken—Yet. But Quantum Might Be Coming for It
The math protecting your crypto wallet might be undone not by hackers or regulators, but by physics. Quantum computing just made a 20x leap toward cracking it.
A new study by Google’s Craig Gidney shows that breaking RSA encryption, a key pillar of online security, might require 20x fewer quantum qubits than previously thought. While Bitcoin uses elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), not RSA, both are vulnerable to quantum attacks via Shor’s algorithm.
Gidney’s update slashes quantum cost estimates, suggesting a post-quantum reckoning may arrive sooner than expected. The timeline is tightening.
- RSA cracking now feasible under 1M qubits
- ECC also vulnerable to Shor’s algorithm
- Quantum bounty already offered for ECC tests
This isn’t alarmist fiction, it’s an accelerating math problem. The infrastructure beneath Web3, email, and banking is still built on vulnerable assumptions. I’ve long argued that future-readiness requires anticipating system-level shocks before they hit. If cryptography itself is at risk, resilience demands more than hope and patchwork.
Read the full article on Coindesk.
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