Google's quantum chip breakthrough: reducing critical computation error rates, quantum risks to early Bitcoin wallets draw attention

BlockBeats news, October 17 — Google said its Willow quantum chip, through a method called "Cultivation," reduced the error rate in preparing the special states (Magic States) required for quantum computing by about 40 times. The related research was published this week in Science, and is expected to lower the hardware overhead of future large-scale quantum computers, while drawing more attention to the potential threat of cracking Bitcoin wallets.

Magic States are a key resource required to perform certain quantum computing operations, and their preparation process consumes a large amount of hardware. Google's experiment this time achieved a state fidelity of about 99.99%, but only about 8% of attempts passed screening. Researchers said that subsequent work still needs to scale up the experiment and solve issues such as real-time operation and error correction.

In March this year, Google estimated that under specific hardware assumptions, future quantum computers might need fewer than 500,000 physical qubits to crack the wallet cryptography used by Bitcoin and Ethereum. For Bitcoin, the public keys of some early wallets have been public since they were mined, and in theory could become targets of future quantum attacks; wallets whose public keys have not yet been made public may face different attack conditions.

However, this breakthrough does not mean that quantum computers are already capable of cracking Bitcoin. Google's previous attack cost estimates already assumed the use of an efficient Magic States preparation scheme, so this result cannot simply be understood as reducing the cost of cracking Bitcoin by another 40 times. The research is still at the stage of advancing quantum hardware and error-correction technology, and the complete equipment and engineering capabilities required for an actual attack have not yet been realized.