Satoshi-era bitcoin faces a bigger quantum threat after Google’s new Willow breakthrough

Google says its Willow quantum chip has cut errors about 40-fold when preparing special states used in quantum calculations, tackling a costly step toward building machines powerful enough to crack bitcoin wallets. The result, published in Science this week, deals with something that rarely comes up in the bitcoin quantum debate — which usually focuses on how big a machine an attacker would need while underplaying how much of that machine would be occupied getting ready to calculate. A bitcoin wallet uses a secret key to approve payments and a matching public key that lets the network check those approvals. Spending typically reveals the public key, while some payment types expose it from the start.

First reported by CoinDesk. This page is a short excerpt; the full text is theirs.