A team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and startup Oratomic have announced research that significantly reduces the hardware needed to run the Sholl algorithm, a quantum method that can break the encryption that protects Bitcoin. This publication came almost in parallel with the research published by Google and the quantum threat to cryptocurrencies.
The study says that just 10,000 atomic qubits would be enough to do this, compared to the millions of atomic qubits that were estimated to be needed until recently.
he paper The paper was published on March 30 this year and signed by nine researchers, including John Preskill. One of the most well-known names in quantum computing worldwide.
research milestones Theoretically, it would be a two-digit decrease. Advances on three fronts: new types of error-correcting codes, more efficient logical operations, and optimized circuit designs result in approximately 100 times the amount of physical hardware needed to run Shor’s algorithm at a cryptographically relevant scale.
The temporal agreement with Google’s research is not small. The Google Quantum AI team has published its own research, estimating that a quantum computer with fewer than 500,000 physical qubits could crack the elliptic curve cryptography that uses Bitcoin in minutes. This is nearly a 20-fold reduction from previous estimates. Both works face the same direction. The computational cost of quantum attacks against Bitcoin is falling faster than expected.
What makes this study different?
The technical key is paper Caltech and Oratomic’s codes are among the types of codes used to correct quantum errors. Quantum computers always make errors, so to compensate, they require many physical qubits to protect each logical qubit (a useful unit of computation). Traditional methods are based on so-called surface codes, Hundreds of physical qubits required for each logical qubit. The authors of the new study used a high-rate code called qLDPC. This succeeded in protecting around 30 logical qubits per 100 physical qubits, compared to the 4% allowed by traditional codes. This allows for a significant reduction in the total number of qubits required.
The platform chosen for this design is a neutral atom, a type of quantum hardware that allows qubits to be moved and rearranged during computing. Implement those highly efficient codes. Recent experiments have already demonstrated the operation of this type of array with more than 6,000 qubits.
Estimated time of attack
The study presents different scenarios depending on the number of qubits and the time available. ECC-256 elliptic curve cryptography (the same one used in Bitcoin) with 11,961 qubits could be cracked in about 264 days. Using 26,000 qubits and a more parallel architecture reduces that time to about 10 days. For RSA-2048, the standard that protects much of the Internet traffic, a similar configuration takes an order of magnitude or two more time (about 20 times longer).
these numbers Assume a measurement cycle of 1 msconservative condition. The authors themselves point out that hardware improvements such as faster reads and faster atomic transport could reduce these times to hours or even minutes.
What is still missing?
This study is a theoretical analysis, not an experiment. Oratomic currently does not have a 10,000-qubit machine operating at this scale. The authors acknowledge that significant engineering challenges remain in integrating all the capabilities currently demonstrated separately into a single system. The expected measurement cycle speed is paper1 ms, additional technical developments are also required to achieve it in practice.
Pressure for post-quantum transition intensifies
What this study and Google’s study add to the discussion is not the specific date of the attack, but rather confirmation that the cost of the hardware needed to carry out the attack is rapidly decreasing. NIST in the US has already published the first post-quantum cryptography standard in 2024, and Bitcoin has the BIP-360 proposal, which proposes a new type of address that can hide public keys against stored attacks. However, this proposal does not yet have consensus within the community..
Researchers like Blockstream co-founder Adam Back see the risks as 10 to 20 years out. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin estimates that this could happen as early as 2028. What these studies change is the most important variable in the equation: how much hardware is actually required for a threat to materialize.
(Tag Translate)Bitcoin (BTC)
