Your Bitcoin may one day be vulnerable to hackers.
Will Quantum Computing Kill Bitcoin?
New research shows how a quantum computer can break cryptocurrencies’ encryption. The latest findings come amid growing concerns that current encryption technologies will not be able to withstand increasing computing power.
“Bitcoin wallets are protected by the same public/private key pairs that are vulnerable to all computers,” Denis Mandich, a former U.S. government information technology executive and now CTO of Qrypt, a quantum entropy startup, told Lifewire in an email interview. “Classical computers can guess weak keys, while quantum computers can simply calculate them. Once the private key is revealed, all the cryptocurrency associated with that public key can be transferred anywhere and added to the blockchain as a valid transaction.”
The new research, published in the journal AVS Quantum Science, was conducted by quantum computing company Universal Quantum in collaboration with academic institutions. It shows that a quantum computer with 13 million physical qubits can crack Bitcoin encryption in a day. A computer with 300 million qubits would need an hour to do the same.
