Study: Estimated Cost of Quantum Attacks on BTC and ETH Drops Over 50%

BlockBeats news, September 10 — According to the latest paper published by researchers from Theta Labs, the Ethereum Foundation, StarkWare, and other institutions, the resources required for the key computational steps of a potential quantum attack on Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) have dropped by more than 50% compared with previous estimates published by Google's Quantum AI team.

The quantum circuit design proposed in the study requires only about 1,151 logical qubits and uses about 1.3 million Toffoli gate operations to complete the relevant computation, with a comprehensive score of about 1.5 billion, lower than the roughly 3 billion level previously published by Google. The research mainly optimizes the point addition computation step in Shor's algorithm, which could theoretically be used with a sufficiently powerful quantum computer to derive a private key from a public key.

Jieyi Long, CTO of Theta Labs and one of the paper's lead authors, said that a quantum attack is not imminent at present, but post-quantum migration takes years and cannot be remedied after an attack occurs.