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Posted on 05/27/2025 10:36:19 AM PDT by dennisw
Google researchers found that cracking RSA encryption—the same tech that secures crypto wallets—needs way fewer quantum resources than anyone thought.
Google just dropped a new research paper, and Bitcoin maxis may want to do some quick math. The tech giant's quantum team found that breaking the RSA encryption protecting everything from your bank account to your Bitcoin wallet might need 20 times fewer quantum resources than previously estimated.
“Planning the transition to quantum-safe cryptosystems requires understanding the cost of quantum attacks on vulnerable cryptosystems,” Google Quantum Researcher Craig Gidney wrote. “In Gidney+Ekerå 2019, I co-published an estimate stating that 2048 bit RSA integers could be factored in eight hours by a quantum computer with 20 million noisy qubits. In this paper, I substantially reduce the number of qubits required.”
“I estimate that a 2048 bit RSA integer could be factored in less than a week by a quantum computer with less than a million noisy qubits,” Gidney argued.
"This is a 20-fold decrease in the number of qubits from our previous estimate," the Google researcher said in an official blog post.
But it’s not like it’s going to happen anytime soon. For context, IBM's Condor (the most powerful quantum computer to date) tops out at 1,121 qubits while Google's own Sycamore runs on 53. So your coins are still safe—for now. The trajectory is what matters, and it's pointing in a direction that should make anyone holding crypto sit up and pay attention.
The breakthrough, Google says, comes from two places: “better algorithms and smarter error correction.” On the algorithm side, researchers figured out how to make calculations for modular exponentiations—the heavy mathematical lifting in encryption—twice as fast, whereas the error correction improvements is possible because the team tripled density of the logical qubits space by adding a new layer of error correction, effectively packaging more useful quantum operations into the same physical space.
They also deployed something called "magic state cultivation"—basically a trick to make special quantum ingredients (called T states) stronger and more reliable, so quantum computers can perform complex tasks more efficiently without wasting extra resources—to reduce the workspace needed for basic quantum operations.
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I'm sensing my laptop may be underpowered.
Looks to me that bitcoin can be decrypted, hacked, what have you with 3-5 years. Are the Chinese and Norks working on this hack? How about Iran?
The first bitcoin hacker decryptor could steal billions or trillions in bitcoin. Depending on what it is worth. Bitcoin market cap is at 2 trillion these days iirc and gold market cap is at 24 trillion
Yup—it might be worth spending a few billion on a research project to steal two trillion dollars.
Why even bother to crack the encryption—brute force (every possible combination) should be able to do the job.
I still have my very first laptop. It was $900 in the 1990s. It has the marvelous dial-up modem.
It was "the latest and greatest" tech at the time. When the World Wide Web was new, I remember how slow websites like the Wall Street Journal would load. This was back when I still read the WSJ. The online WSJ was free when the website was first created. After one year, it went behind the pay wall.
Anyway, this latest and greatest tech had...... 4 RAM. And I thought I was hot shhhhtuff.
Or it could be used to easily mine more Bitcoin.
But we have been told that bitcoin can’t be hacked.
We have been told that the block chain technology books transactions and stores records in many different locations online, and this is supposed to prevent hacking or someone stealing your bitcoin.
Because supposedly with so many different records of transactions, it would supposedly be impossible to change the records in all the different locations on the block chain, to just steal bitcoin. And supposedly the block chain records must always be in balance.
It sounds like hackers are hard at work.
My Dell color at the time was 2 grand. It had 100megabyte storage - nowadays a single phone app uses more :)
There’s one sure way to avoid this threat.......don’t own crypto.
With Bitcoin it really doesn’t have value unless you convert your coins to some currency? So once chips are here that are superior to Bitcoins system what then ?....I imagine whoever cashed out early wins the P.T. Barum award .
You can buy a nice refurbished PC for $100-125. I bought those and they gave good service for 7+ years.
Musical chairs.
My first computer had a 40meg hard drive and 1 meg of ram. Took 6 years to fill the hard drive.
perplexity AI>>>
Bitcoin market cap is at 2 trillion these days iirc and gold market cap is at 24 trillion????
Your figures are accurate for late May 2025:
Bitcoin’s market cap is about $2.17–$2.19 trillion.
Gold’s market cap is between $20.8 trillion and $22.1 trillion, depending on the estimate and methodology.
Gold’s market cap is calculated by multiplying the current gold price by the total above-ground reserves, which can vary by source. As of early 2025, estimates place it between roughly $17.7 trillion and $26.5 trillion, with most recent figures clustering around $21–22 trillion.
In summary, Bitcoin’s market cap is just under one-tenth of gold’s, using the most widely cited numbers as of May 2025.
Note that this is the same level of encryption that protects your bank account and credit cards.
The tech giant's quantum team found that breaking the RSA encryption protecting everything from your bank account to your Bitcoin wallet
The only winning move is not to play ...
You can eventually crack asymmetric cryptographic systems using quantum computation but symmetric encryption is a lot different.
Quantum computing cannot now nor will it ever be able to break something like simple XOR encryption that uses a true source of random bits.
What’s so cool about asymmetric crypto (public key) is that there is no password exchange problem to solve.. it’s a pity that most public key systems will be vulnerable... they are so handy :-/
Yep. The whole financial system is a game of musical chairs.
The movie Margin Call explained it best.
Great movie!
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