Quantum Computing Breakthrough Reduces Estimated Resources Needed to Attack Bitcoin Encryption by 86%

An open research project has made significant strides in reducing the estimated quantum computing resources needed to attack the encryption used by Bitcoin and other blockchain networks. The study, which combined human scientists with AI agents, optimized a reversible circuit for elliptic-curve point addition, an operation required to run Shor's algorithm against elliptic-curve cryptography.

The researchers focused on secp256k1, the particular elliptic curve used by Bitcoin and Ethereum, and were able to reduce their principal measure of the circuit's resource cost by 86.1% from the project's starting point. The best entry used 1,151 logical qubits and an average of 1,299,453 Toffoli gates.

The work does not demonstrate a working attack on Bitcoin or show that existing quantum computers can recover cryptocurrency private keys. Instead, it narrows estimates of what a future fault-tolerant quantum computer would need to perform one important part of such an attack.

As quantum hardware advances, the researchers emphasize the importance of credible and reproducible estimates of the resources required to break deployed cryptography. These estimates will help governments, blockchain developers, and cryptocurrency holders plan for a transition to cryptographic systems designed to resist quantum computers.