Cracking Bitcoin Takes Only 9 Minutes? Google Warns of Elliptic Curve Cryptography Doomsday Sooner Than Expected, Lowers Attack Threshold by 20x

According to 1M AI News monitoring, Google's quantum AI team has released a whitepaper demonstrating a significant optimization of the Shor algorithm. The Shor algorithm can break the elliptic curve encryption used by Bitcoin and Ethereum, allowing attackers to derive private keys from public keys and steal funds once quantum computers are powerful enough. The team compiled two sets of attack circuits, requiring less than 1200 and less than 1450 logical qubits (computational units composed of hundreds of physical qubits with error correction) respectively. On a superconducting quantum computer, both circuits can perform the computation in minutes with less than 500,000 physical qubits. The previous mainstream estimate in academia was around 10 million physical qubits, making this breakthrough lower the threshold by about 20 times.

Attackers can precompute most of the work and crack the private key within about 9 minutes after a Bitcoin transaction is broadcasted. With Bitcoin's average block time of about 10 minutes, attackers have approximately a 41% chance of hijacking funds before the transaction is confirmed. Currently, around 6.9 million Bitcoins (about a third of the total supply) are at potential risk due to exposed public keys, with approximately 1.7 million coins coming from the early network. Google also points out that the Taproot upgrade in 2021 defaults to exposing public keys, potentially further expanding the scope of vulnerable wallets.

The team did not disclose the specific implementation of the attack circuits but released a zero-knowledge proof allowing third parties to verify the correctness of the conclusions without revealing the attack method. Google's Quantum Algorithm Research Director Ryan Babbush and Google's Quantum AI Engineering VP Hartmut Neven stated that the team had already communicated with the U.S. government before the release and is currently collaborating with Coinbase, the Stanford Blockchain Research Center, and the Ethereum Foundation to advance post-quantum transition. Google had previously set 2029 as the deadline for its own authentication services to transition to post-quantum encryption. Nic Carter, co-founder of Castle Island Ventures, called this paper "very sobering" and wrote, "Elliptic curve cryptography is on the verge of obsolescence. Whether it's 3 years or 10 years, it's over, and we need to accept that."