Replying to Avatar Vlad, Bitcoin Takeover Podcast

How powerful does a quantum computer need to become to break Bitcoin's elliptic curve public key cryptography? Quote from a 2022 research paper:

"It would require 317 × 10^6 physical qubits to break the encryption within one hour using the surface code, a code cycle time of 1 μs, a reaction time of 10 μs, and a physical gate error of 10^(−3).

To instead break the encryption within one day, it would require 13 × 10^6 physical qubits"

Today's most powerful quantum computer is at 127 qbits (created by IBM).
Avatar
( -_-) 2y ago

So like 17 doublings? Obviously very rough and uncertain, but Moore's law equivalent for qbits seems to be a doubling every ~5 years.

That implies bitcoin keys will be insecure in about 85 years, no?

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

Avatar
Vlad, Bitcoin Takeover Podcast 2y ago

Probably sooner, if enough time and resources are allocated towards brute forcing a specific wallet (1000 days to steal 50 BTC from one of Satoshi's UTXOs).

But cryptography will also improve in the meantime.

Avatar
( -_-) 2y ago

Cryptography will improve, but I imagine the difficult part would be hard forking bitcoin at that stage. You would have to give some huge (decade long) window for people to move to the new system in anticipation of this happening, and then burn all the coins that don't move.