This post was originally published on Coinspeaker
A new paper from Google Quantum AI has compressed the estimated hardware requirements for breaking elliptic-curve cryptography – the signature scheme underpinning Bitcoin and crypto transactions – by roughly 20-fold, moving a long-running theoretical threat measurably closer to an engineering problem.
The research, co-authored by Google researchers, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake, and Stanford cryptographer Dan Boneh, revises the physical qubit threshold downward from prior estimates exceeding 10 million to fewer than 500,000, a compression that forces institutional risk models to treat Q-Day as a medium-term rather than generational concern. At current market prices, the assets directly exposed to the cryptographic assumption at issue exceed $600 billion across Bitcoin, Ethereum, and stablecoins.
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Shor’s Algorithm Efficiency: What the 20x Qubit Compression Actually Represents
The operative mechanism here is Shor’s algorithm applied to the 256-bit elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem – the mathematical foundation of ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm), which Bitcoin and Ethereum use to authorize transactions by proving private key ownership without revealing the key itself.
A sufficiently capable quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm could, in principle, derive a private key from an exposed public key, allowing an attacker
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