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Google Just Proved 500,000 Qubits Could Break Bitcoin. Now What?
A.Khettany4 min read·Just now--
The entire security model of cryptocurrency just got an expiration date.
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This morning, Google Quantum AI published what might be the most consequential paper in the history of cryptocurrency security.
Their conclusion: fewer than 500,000 qubits could derive a Bitcoin private key from its public key in under 9 minutes. That’s 20× fewer qubits than previously estimated. Some researchers now place a 10% probability on such a machine existing by 2032. Six years from now.
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What Google actually proved
Let's be precise. Google’s paper targets ECDSA — the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm. When you "own" Bitcoin, what you actually own is a private key. Your public key is derived from it through elliptic curve multiplication.
The security assumption: given the public key, nobody can compute the private key. Shor’s algorithm breaks this assumption completely. Not "makes it harder." Breaks it. On a sufficiently powerful quantum computer, deriving the private key becomes as trivial as reading a street sign.
What Google showed is that "sufficiently powerful" means far fewer resources than we thought.
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Who is vulnerable? Not every Bitcoin address is equally at risk:
