AI-Boosted Quantum Attack on Bitcoin Cryptography Now Easier, Researchers Warn
Researchers working with AI coding agents have made significant strides in reducing the cost of a potential quantum attack on Bitcoin and Ethereum's cryptography. According to a paper posted Wednesday, they achieved an 86% reduction in a resource benchmark for a key step in such an attack.
The researchers used ECDSA.Fail, an open competition launched by Eigen Labs in late May, to design and test a quantum circuit that performs a calculation needed to crack Bitcoin's cryptography. The tests verified the circuit's calculations but did not crack a private key.
The challenge measured how much quantum memory and computational work each circuit needed, multiplying its logical qubits by its Toffoli gates. A lower score means the calculation requires fewer combined resources, potentially making a future attack easier to carry out.
By July 26, participants had cut that score from 10.75 billion to 1.496 billion, roughly half of Google Quantum AI's March benchmark. The leading design used 1,151 logical qubits and about 1.3 million Toffoli gates.