Bitcoin can be hacked, Quantum’s biggest breakthrough is not,

Bitcoin may seem out of hand, but quantum hardware already marks the beginning of its end. The question is no longer, but when.

Bitcoin’s long-standing wall scratching

On September 2nd, Steve Tippeconnic, a researcher using IBM’s 133 quit machine, achieved what was only theoretically until recently.

With the help of quantum interference, the small elliptic curve encryption key is broken, and Shor’s algorithm proves that it can withstand real hardware across the blackboard.

The keys were only 6 bits long and gave just 64 answers. Today’s phone can quickly brute force it. But that was never the point.

The breakthrough is to show that quantum circuits running hundreds of thousands of layers can tick patterns of strength enough to reveal the correct answer.

The recovered key, K = 42, surfaced three times the top 100 results after more than 16,000 runs. Its success rate may sound less impressive than 1% at first, but encryption meant everything.

We have verified that quantum machines can reliably amplify the correct solution even when noise, false candidates, and hardware errors flood the measurement space. The key change was that mathematics actually worked, not just simulations.

With Bitcoin (BTC), nothing changes overnight. 6-bit is a child’s toy compared to a 256-bit key that protects the network. The difference between the 64 options and the 2^256 possibilities is astronomical. What changed was the conversation.

Today’s standards, tomorrow’s flaws

History shows that as computing methods progress, cryptosystems that were once considered secure ultimately fail. The German Enigma machine is the most famous example.

During World War II, Nazi Germany used extensively to encrypt Enigma-encrypted military communications, ranging from submarine movements to battlefield orders.

It relies on a series of replacement ciphers that generated possible configurations of over 150 Quintilion, convincing the German order that their message would not break.

Bletchley Park’s Allied Codebreakers were supported by early mechanical devices such as the Bombe and subsequent Colossus computers, reducing the problem to a manageable format.

The breakthrough shows for the first time that exposing German communication in real time, shortening wars, and human ingenuity combined with new machines can overcome the vast mathematical defenses.

In the 1970s, the US developed the Data Encryption Standard (DES) to ensure commercial communication with governments in an era of rapid expansion of banks and computing networks.

The 56-bit key length was considered strong enough for modern hardware and became a federal standard.

But by 1998, the Electronic Frontier Foundation had demonstrated how quickly its security could progress. It built a purpose-designed machine called Deep Crack, which brutes the DES key in 56 hours at a cost of around $250,000.

Shortly afterwards, volunteer collective distributed.net combined global computing resources to reduce attack time to just 22 hours.

These milestones have proven outdated. Within a few years it officially retired and was replaced by advanced encryption standards that now continue to protect governments, businesses and consumer systems.

The hash function followed a similar path. Introduced in 1995, the SHA-1 algorithm became the backbone of digital certificates, software updates and online signatures that protected many of the early web.

For years it resisted practical attacks and was trusted by browsers, certificate authorities and the government. That confidence ended in 2017 when researchers from Google and CWI Amsterdam announced Shattered, the first practical collision attack on SHA-1.

I created two different PDF files with the same hash, proving that the algorithm was manipulated and that it was no longer trustworthy for security.

Within a few months, major browsers and certificate authorities abandoned the SHA-1 and forced a shift to stronger standards such as the SHA-256.

These cases reveal a consistent pattern. Systems were once thought to be unattended, but not because of design flaws, but because computing power and algorithms continue to advance.

Billions of Qubits from breakthroughs

Bitcoin’s elliptic curve encryption relies on 256-bit keys. Its size corresponds to a possible combination of approximately 1.16 x 10^77.

According to the NIST standard, the 256-bit key provides a 128-bit security strength. This is considered computationally ineffective for brute force on classical machines. Independent estimates show that such attacks take longer than space age.

Quantum Computing introduces another model. Shor’s algorithm scales with cubes of input size rather than 2^n, reducing the discrete logarithmic problem from exponents to polynomial time.

A 2017 study by Microsoft researcher Martin Roetteler and colleagues estimated that breaking the 256-bit elliptic curve key would result in around 2,300 logical kibits in order of thousands by calculation.

Because qubits today are error prone, these logical qubits are converted into billions of physical qubits when error correction is taken into consideration.

Current hardware is not close to that scale. Announced in December 2023, IBM’s largest processor, Condor, has 1,121 qubits, and Google’s Willow chip reached 105 qubits in 2024.

According to a 2025 report from the US Government’s Accountability Office, experts foresee the potential emergence of quantum computers associated with encryption that can break widely used public key cryptography within about 10-20 years.

A 2024 expert survey from the Global Risk Institute reflects uncertainty and suggests that such a system is possible in the long run, even though it is still decades away.

Build defenses before quantum storms

Governments and businesses have already begun their plans in an era when today’s encryption is no longer maintained.

In 2016, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) launched a global competition to design quantum-resistant cryptography. From over 80 submissions, four algorithms were selected in 2022 for standardization.

These include crystal keybars for key exchanges and key exchanges and crystals for digital signatures – dilithium, falcon, and butterflies. NIST says the formal standards will be made public by 2026, giving governments and industries a clear path to migration.

National security agencies link policies to these technical standards. The US National Security Agency mandates that all classifications and national security systems move to post-Quantum algorithms by 2035, with Canada and the European Union launching similar initiatives.

CloudFlare is moving beyond plans. As of early 2025, over 38% of all human HTTPS traffic across the network uses hybrid TLS, combining classic and quality key exchanges by default. In some European countries, four-way product encryption has already exceeded 50% adoption.

The company has also built post-Quantum protection in the Zero Trust Suite, expanding coverage to internal enterprise traffic through platforms such as Gateway, Access and Warp Clients, with full support being deployed by mid-2025.

Central banks and financial regulators have issued guidance warning agencies to prepare for the risk of “harvest now, decrypting later.” In this case, the encrypted records captured today may be exposed when they reach the required scale.

Bitcoin is in this massive transition. Reliance on the elliptic curve SECP256K1 directly exposes quantum advances, but changes to the protocol require global adjustments.

The academic proposal explains how new signature schemes can be introduced through optional script upgrades, allowing post-Quantum addresses to exist together with the classics.

Developer discussions show both the urgency and difficulty of such changes, as even minor upgrades require consensus between miners, exchanges, and users.

The 6-bit elliptic curve experiment on IBM’s IBM_TORINO machine in 2025 proves this concept on a small scale, showing that Shor’s algorithm can be run not only on theory but on real hardware.

Once thought to be impossible, tasks often become routine when methods and machines catch up. Considering large integers out of reach, classical algorithms up to hundreds of digits are trivial. Protein folding is not considered long, but is now processed in minutes by AI models.

The same arc applies to encryption. Bitcoin’s 256-bit wall cannot be violated today, but the roadmap of mathematics, algorithms and hardware points to all futures where that barrier is no longer held.