Quantum Threat to Bitcoin: New Paper Cuts Encryption Cost by 50%
A new cryptography paper has reduced the estimated cost of cracking Bitcoin's encryption by roughly 50% compared to Google Quantum AI's March benchmark. This significant improvement has sparked debate about whether Q-Day, a hypothetical date when quantum computers become a serious threat to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, is getting closer.
The researchers behind the paper, posted on September 9, used an open community effort with human researchers and AI coding agents to design and optimize the circuits. They brought the estimated resource requirement down by 86.1% from the project's starting point in May, achieving a final benchmark of roughly 1.5 billion based on 1,151 logical qubits and about 1.3 million Toffoli gates.
The results are not directly comparable to Google's March benchmark due to differences in resource measurement, but the paper shows how quickly estimates can change as researchers find more efficient ways to build circuits. The authors acknowledge that their figures do not reflect a complete attack, as error correction is not included and would add significantly to the resource requirement.
Oli Freuler of StarkWare emphasized the significance of this shift, stating, 'Google kept its circuits private. ECDSA.fail's open community and AI agents more than halved Google's benchmark score in about two months.'