Quantum Breakthroughs Questioned: Google Scientist Slams Project Eleven's Q-Day Prize

A recent contest, Project Eleven's Q-Day Prize, awarded a 1 BTC bounty to Giancarlo Lelli for achieving a 15-bit elliptic curve private key on cloud-accessible hardware. However, Google quantum researcher Craig Gidney has criticized the contest, arguing that the winning result proves far less than advertised.

Gidney pointed out that the benchmark used in the contest is not meaningful for current quantum computers and requires quantum error correction for cryptographically significant instances. He also cited a GitHub user's experiment where swapping quantum calls with random calls resulted in indistinguishable results.

Project Eleven CEO Alex Pruden defended the contest, stating that resource requirements for such attacks are decreasing rapidly. The group has also suggested that recent estimates put a full 256-bit attack at under 500,000 physical qubits, or as low as 10,000 qubits according to a Caltech and Oratomic paper.

Gidney acknowledged the importance of quantum risk but emphasized the need for better benchmarks. He noted that Google and Cloudflare are working on post-quantum migration and that the crypto industry has spent the past year debating defensive options.