Google published a whitepaper yesterday that dramatically pulled in the horizon on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Google Quantum AI researchers claim that cracking the cryptography protecting many major coins, including bitcoin and ether, could require a quantum computer with fewer than 500,000 physical qubits, something in the order of 20 times lower than previous estimates, Forbes reports.
Indeed, one of the paper's co-authors, Justin Drake, has concluded that the timeframe for "Q-Day", the hypothetical moment when a sufficiently powerful quantum computer becomes capable of breaking the public-key encryption algorithms that underpin much of modern digital security including cryptocurrencies, could arrive much sooner than previously thought.
