Did you hear about Google’s (GOOG) big breakthrough in quantum computing?
The tech giant unveiled its “Willow” quantum computing chip last week, a groundbreaking achievement.
Google claims Willow can solve certain computational tasks in just five minutes, which would take classical supercomputers 10 septillion years.
That’s longer than the universe has been around. 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years, to be exact!
With this kind of speed, everyone now wants to know… could quantum computing hack bitcoin (BTC)?
It’s important to point out, first of all, that this was a benchmark test specifically chosen for quantum computers. So for everything “practical,” normal computers are still better.
Willow is incredibly powerful in a very specific way. It solves highly specialized math problems much faster than traditional computers. But if you were to take this and try to run an artificial intelligence (AI) system on it, the traditional computer would still be better.
Regarding crypto specifically, Willow is nowhere near powerful enough to crack bitcoin seed phrases. It only has 105 qubits, which is great for quantum experiments but far from what’s needed to break bitcoin’s encryption. Experts estimate you’d need about 1 million high-quality qubits to make a dent in bitcoin’s security.
More than that, I recently met a guy in San Francisco who told me he’s backing a startup that’s working on quantum cryptography. As quantum computers get more powerful, bitcoin won’t just “stand still”… it’ll just adopt whatever the new standard is.
One more thing…
People have asked, “Is this the new ChatGPT moment?”
No. This is like back in the 1940s when we invented the first-ever computer. Quantum computers are not just a faster computer; they’re a new type of computer that do completely different things.
So that’s where we are. And I would just also remind people that the first AI paper was published in 1943, so that was 80 years before we got ChatGPT.
Quantum computing’s going to be big, but it’s going to take a long time.
Here’s another reason why you shouldn’t be worried.
There are ways to encrypt data that would theoretically be “unhackable,” even by a true quantum computer. And the way you do that is to take advantage of the same area of physics — quantum mechanics — that quantum computers use.
So (bear with me here), where quantum computers leverage superposition and entanglement to do countless calculations at once… you can build encryption that takes advantage of a fundamental law of quantum mechanics. If you try to observe or measure a particle or quantum system, you change its state.
So if you try to eavesdrop on a transmission like this, you basically corrupt it, and you can’t read it.
This is already being done in the real world. It’s called quantum key distribution (QKD). Toshiba, for example, has a QKD system that uses single particles of light called photons to make encryption keys to secure data that’s being sent from a facility in London to a facility 30 miles away.
The point here is that there are a lot of smart people thinking about these issues and coming up with solutions — solutions that could be used for crypto and blockchains. So even a powerful quantum computer wouldn’t spell the end of crypto or blockchain technology.
From a trader’s perspective, Google’s breakthrough doesn’t look like a threat to bitcoin.
I asked my colleague Justin Spittler to tell me what his view on this topic is.
If you don’t know Justin yet, he’s RiskHedge’s Chief Trader. He also just started his Medium account, so click here and give him a follow.
Here’s what he has to say:
“From a trader’s perspective, if Google’s breakthrough was a significant threat to bitcoin right now, bitcoin wouldn’t be above $100K again.And it wouldn’t be setting up to rip to $115K/$120K, which I think happens before the end of the year.And you wouldn’t see all these altcoins breaking out left and right.Bitcoin would be down significantly, maybe around 50%, if quantum computing was truly an immediate threat to bitcoin. In other words, the market would be taking it way more seriously.From a trader’s point of view and from the market’s perspective, it’s not a serious immediate-term threat. Because if it were, bitcoin would be getting slaughtered.”
Bottom line: What Google did is amazing. It’s a major step forward for quantum computing. But it doesn’t impact the bullish case for crypto one bit.
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— Stephen McBride, Chief Analyst at RiskHedge
Can quantum computing hack bitcoin? was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.