Bitcoin and Ethereum Are Planning for Quantum Computers. Q-AMCHAIN Started There
For most of the past decade, the quantum threat to cryptocurrency sat in the "someday" column. This year it moved closer.On March 31, Google's Quantum AI team published a 57-page paper estimating that the elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) behind Bitcoin and Ethereum wallets could be broken with fewer than 500,000 physical qubits, in a runtime measured in minutes rather than days. Earlier estimates ran into the millions. Ethereum researcher Justin Drake and Stanford cryptographer Dan Boneh were among the co-authors. A week before, Google had set the end of 2029 as its own deadline for moving its products to post-quantum cryptography (PQC).No quantum computer that size exists yet. But the gap between theory and hardware keeps narrowing, and public blockchains are notoriously slow to ...










