Elon Musk dropped a bomb on the cryptocurrency market when he highlighted the impact of Google's recent announcement about the impact of quantum computing.
Elon Musk has added his voice to fears sparked by Google dramatically bringing forward its quantum computing timeline, putting almost $500 billion worth of bitcoin at risk.
"On the plus side, if you forgot the password to your wallet, it will be accessible in the future," Musk posted to X alongside a “conversation” with Musk’s Grok chatbot that said post-quantum migration for cryptocurrencies “is urgent now.”
Musk was responding to venture capitalist Max Reiff who summarized Google’s research as, “basically saying: ‘We’ve cut the quantum resources needed to break bitcoin’s encryption by 20x. We can now break it. We can prove it. We’re just not going to tell you how. We’ve slowed down research to give crypto a chance. You have until 2029 to figure out a solution. Good luck.’”
. . .
Earlier this week, Google’s Quantum AI team warned in a paper that the number of qubits required to break the cryptography protecting bitcoin and ethereum wallets is potentially as much as 20-fold lower than previous estimates.
“We’re setting a timeline for post-quantum cryptography migration to 2029,” Google’s vice president of security engineering Heather Adkins wrote in a blog post. "Quantum computers will pose a significant threat to current cryptographic standards, and specifically to encryption and digital signatures."
Venture capitalist Nic Carter, who has been sounding the alarm on quantum computing’s threat to crypto since last year, compared the quantum threat to the Manhattan Project, the top-secret U.S. government program that led to the development of nuclear weapons.
There's more at the link.
This is serious enough when it comes to cryptocurrency - any cryptocurrency. There are no pieces of paper changing hands in cryptocurrency transactions. It's all done electronically, with one's cryptocurrency holdings being held in an electronic "wallet" with a passcode to access them. Until now, that passcode has been considered very secure in the face of current decoding/decryption technology. However, quantum computers can tackle the decryption problem many orders of magnitude faster than present computers. Once they're on the market, much that is cryptologically "secure" today will no longer be so.
Now, apply that to any other codes, cyphers, etc. Literally any secret message at all will be subject to cryptological analysis and attack. Top secret military signals, inter-bank communications about economic activity, diplomatic messages - any and all of them that use current encryption technology will be vulnerable. Many believe that major actors in the field are already storing every encrypted message they can intercept, even if they can't read them, because when they can read them (with the aid of quantum computers) in a few years' time, they'll be a gold mine of historical information that can be used to analyze current events and predict future decisions. Even so-called "one-time pad" or OTP encryption - seen until now as the only truly unbreakable code, provided that all requirements for their creation and use are strictly observed - won't be as secure if quantum computers can identify any failure to meet one or more requirements, and use that weakness to break into the code. (However, quantum key distribution and other new technologies may step up to make the OTP even more secure.)
If Google's prediction is correct, a great deal that is now secret won't be for much longer. That might be catastrophic in many ways. On the other hand, James Howells might be happy at last! He's the man who threw away a computer hard drive containing the key to a cryptocurrency wallet containing (he claims) about US $700 million in Bitcoin. If he can recall the address of the wallet, the new quantum decryption technology might let him reclaim its contents . . . but only if someone else doesn't remember his story and get there ahead of him, locating the wallet, decrypting its key, and making off with the Bitcoin first!
Peter
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