Bitcoin will be hackable with quantum computers by 2027

[Millard]

Bitcoin’s race to outrun the quantum computer

Want to steal some Bitcoin? All you need to do is find your victim’s 16-character public key and calculate their private key by solving something called an “elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem.” No sweat! With a regular computer, that’ll take you around 50 million times the amount of time the universe itself has left—around 0.65 billion billion years.

Ah, but with the right quantum computer, able to process information at speeds exponentially faster than today’s supercomputers? Suddenly, what seems uncrackable becomes child’s play, able to be broken in under 10 minutes.
​

Reference: Quantum Attacks on Bitcoin, and How to Protect Against Them | Aggarwal | Ledger

 

[bigrobbie]

A thief will find a way to be...well, a thief.

 

[Millard]

The quantum revolution is coming, and Chinese scientists are at the forefront

China’s drive to dominate a field with big economic and military applications outpaces some U.S. strides

More than a decade ago, Chinese physicist Pan Jian-Wei returned home from Europe to help oversee research into some of the most important technology of the 21st century.

At a conference in Shanghai this summer, Pan and his team offered a rare peek at the work he described as a “revolution.”

They spoke of the hacking-resistant communications networks they are building across China, the sensors they are designing to see through smog and around corners, and the prototype computers that may someday smash the computational power of any existing machine.

All the gear is based on quantum technology — an emerging field that could transform information processing and confer big economic and national-security advantages to countries that dominate it. To the dismay of some scientists and officials in the United States, China’s formidable investment is helping it catch up with Western research in the field and, in a few areas, pull ahead.​

 

[flenser]

Based on some of the quantum cloud services available NOW, it wouldn't surprise me to see it happen much sooner than 2027. I was surprised to learn that some of the servers are more or less sitting idle due to a lack of demand.

 

[Mac11wildcat]

The quantum revolution is coming, and Chinese scientists are at the forefront

China’s drive to dominate a field with big economic and military applications outpaces some U.S. strides

More than a decade ago, Chinese physicist Pan Jian-Wei returned home from Europe to help oversee research into some of the most important technology of the 21st century.

At a conference in Shanghai this summer, Pan and his team offered a rare peek at the work he described as a “revolution.”

They spoke of the hacking-resistant communications networks they are building across China, the sensors they are designing to see through smog and around corners, and the prototype computers that may someday smash the computational power of any existing machine.

All the gear is based on quantum technology — an emerging field that could transform information processing and confer big economic and national-security advantages to countries that dominate it. To the dismay of some scientists and officials in the United States, China’s formidable investment is helping it catch up with Western research in the field and, in a few areas, pull ahead.​

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View attachment 117108

Where’s an audio clip of trump saying “China” when you need it...

 

[Dw725]

Based on some of the quantum cloud services available NOW, it wouldn't surprise me to see it happen much sooner than 2027. I was surprised to learn that some of the servers are more or less sitting idle due to a lack of demand.

Agreed.

It seems that when science made predictions in the past , that we would have x by yy date, they were usually jumping the gun. But at the exponential rate tech is advancing , we usually beat those dates now.

Look how powerful our pocket computers have become in just ten years, and the advancements in ai over just the past 5.

 

[flenser]

Agreed.

It seems that when science made predictions in the past , that we would have x by yy date, they were usually jumping the gun. But at the exponential rate tech is advancing , we usually beat those dates now.

Look how powerful our pocket computers have become in just ten years, and the advancements in ai over just the past 5.

I am mostly looking at what it would take to make the necessary server time available to would be hackers, assuming the hackers know the public keys of wallets containing very large sums worth the cost of the server time.

The trouble I see with quantum computer advances is the material science has no promising research (that I know of) to move the processors off of servers and into the hands of consumers. That limits the applications it can be used for significantly which will keep costs high, even if those costs are temporarily depressed.

 

[Masterofron]

I wish XMR was more commonly used..

 

[Serono]

I am mostly looking at what it would take to make the necessary server time available to would be hackers, assuming the hackers know the public keys of wallets containing very large sums worth the cost of the server time.

This wouldn't really make sense though unless there is FAR more liquidity in the market when this happens. Trying to move and liquidate large sums of btc, in it's current state, can drop the market significantly. Something like this would be catastrophic.

In this hypothetical scenario, the second quantum computing breaks a private key, the market will tank on fear alone, and the coins will be near worthless. People watch large addresses, and they know when things move, or get transferred to exchanges. There will be a VERY small window to get the BTC to fiat, which will leave an obvious paper-trail.

The only goal for someone to use QC to crack private keys would be to harm/kill btc.

That said, QC poses a lot of issues aside from BTC. At the point quantum can crack BTC, it will have been able to crack a lot of other, potentially more significant things, far sooner.

There are people working hard on making BTC and other cryptos quantum resistant, so we will see how tat goes.

I wish XMR was more commonly used..

As do I, but there are easy ways to spend XMR anon and the recipient gets BTC. So this way YOU can use XMR.

 

[Masterofron]

This wouldn't really make sense though unless there is FAR more liquidity in the market when this happens. Trying to move and liquidate large sums of btc, in it's current state, can drop the market significantly. Something like this would be catastrophic.

In this hypothetical scenario, the second quantum computing breaks a private key, the market will tank on fear alone, and the coins will be near worthless. People watch large addresses, and they know when things move, or get transferred to exchanges. There will be a VERY small window to get the BTC to fiat, which will leave an obvious paper-trail.

The only goal for someone to use QC to crack private keys would be to harm/kill btc.

That said, QC poses a lot of issues aside from BTC. At the point quantum can crack BTC, it will have been able to crack a lot of other, potentially more significant things, far sooner.

There are people working hard on making BTC and other cryptos quantum resistant, so we will see how tat goes.

As do I, but there are easy ways to spend XMR anon and the recipient gets BTC. So this way YOU can use XMR.

Yes xmr.to, I’m writing a guide later as many people have been curious to learn how to use Monero.

 

[Millard]

Is it here now?

Google scientists say they’ve achieved ‘quantum supremacy’ breakthrough over classical computers

If validated, the report by Google’s AI Quantum team constitutes a major leap for quantum computing, a technology that relies on the bizarre behavior of tiny particles to encode huge amounts of information. According to a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, Google’s Sycamore processor performed in less than three and a half minutes a calculation that would take the most powerful classical computer on the planet 10,000 years to complete.​

Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor | Nature

The promise of quantum computers is that certain computational tasks might be executed exponentially faster on a quantum processor than on a classical processor1. A fundamental challenge is to build a high-fidelity processor capable of running quantum algorithms in an exponentially large computational space. Here we report the use of a processor with programmable superconducting qubits to create quantum states on 53 qubits, corresponding to a computational state-space of dimension 253 (about 1016). Measurements from repeated experiments sample the resulting probability distribution, which we verify using classical simulations. Our Sycamore processor takes about 200 seconds to sample one instance of a quantum circuit a million times—our benchmarks currently indicate that the equivalent task for a state-of-the-art classical supercomputer would take approximately 10,000 years. This dramatic increase in speed compared to all known classical algorithms is an experimental realization of quantum supremacy for this specific computational task, heralding a much-anticipated computing paradigm.​

 

[Sworder]

Yeah, Google has been experimenting with their super computers and created "neural networks." Self learning AI that has been blowing away chess players. It is a breakthrough(?) Let's hope they use that power for the people

 

[adnansanat]

Yes xmr.to, I’m writing a guide later as many people have been curious to learn how to use Monero.

Yes! Please write that guide! Would be awesome!

Monero is basically, what Bitcoin should be. Fungible, digital money, private and secure.