I wanted to see for myself how long it would take various strengths of quantum computers to brute force a single SHA256 hash. I couldn’t find any comprehensive research, so after finding a couple data points from Bitcoin news sources, I extrapolated the rest.

From what I can tell, the strongest quantum computer currently is ~1k qubits. However, there appear to be many, many caveats. Ex. All qubits aren’t made equal. I’m also not a quantum computer expert at all. These calculations could be way off. Corrections welcome.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

Quantum computers don't allow you to brute force hashes. Information is lost when you hash something larger than the hash function output. Quantum computers can't magically bring that data back.

Presumably the research I saw didn’t mean brute force then. Some other way.