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Quantum

Cracking Bitcoin-Like Encryption Through Quantum Computing Could be 20x Easier Than Thought

by admin May 27, 2025

Shaurya is the Co-Leader of the CoinDesk tokens and data team in Asia with a focus on crypto derivatives, DeFi, market microstructure, and protocol analysis.

Shaurya holds over $1,000 in BTC, ETH, SOL, AVAX, SUSHI, CRV, NEAR, YFI, YFII, SHIB, DOGE, USDT, USDC, BNB, MANA, MLN, LINK, XMR, ALGO, VET, CAKE, AAVE, COMP, ROOK, TRX, SNX, RUNE, FTM, ZIL, KSM, ENJ, CKB, JOE, GHST, PERP, BTRFLY, OHM, BANANA, ROME, BURGER, SPIRIT, and ORCA.

He provides over $1,000 to liquidity pools on Compound, Curve, SushiSwap, PancakeSwap, BurgerSwap, Orca, AnySwap, SpiritSwap, Rook Protocol, Yearn Finance, Synthetix, Harvest, Redacted Cartel, OlympusDAO, Rome, Trader Joe, and SUN.

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May 27, 2025 0 comments

NFT Gaming

It Might Actually Be 20 Times Easier for Quantum Computers to Break Bitcoin, Google Says

by admin May 27, 2025

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.

Image: Google

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.

Image: ArXiv

Why should Bitcoin holders care about Quantum computers?

Bitcoin relies on elliptic curve cryptography, which works on similar mathematical principles to RSA. If quantum computers can crack RSA faster than expected, Bitcoin’s security timeline just got compressed. The cryptocurrency’s 256-bit encryption is stronger than the older RSA keys Google studied, but not by as much as you might hope when dealing with exponential scaling.

And there are already experts trying to find ways to apply quantum tech to break Bitcoin.

As previously reported by Decrypt, Project 11, a quantum computing research group, launched a Bitcoin bounty worth nearly $85,000 for anyone who can break even a simplified version of Bitcoin’s encryption using a quantum computer. They’re testing keys ranging from 1 to 25 bits—tiny compared to Bitcoin’s 256-bit encryption, but it’s about tracking progress.

“Bitcoin’s security relies on elliptic curve cryptography. Quantum computers running Shor’s algorithm will eventually break it,” Project 11 wrote when announcing their challenge. “We’re testing how urgent the threat is.”

Bitcoin’s security relies on elliptic curve cryptography.
Quantum computers running Shor’s algorithm will eventually break it.

We’re testing how urgent the threat is.

— Project 11 (@qdayclock) April 16, 2025

The security implications extend beyond crypto. RSA and similar systems underpin global secure communications, from banking to digital signatures. Google noted that adversaries could already be collecting encrypted data now to decrypt later once quantum computers become available, so they are preparing for this imminent future.

“Google has therefore been encrypting traffic both in Chrome and internally, switching to the standardized version of ML-KEM once it became available,” Google said.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology released post-quantum cryptography standards last year and recommended phasing out vulnerable systems after 2030. Google’s research suggests that timeline might need acceleration.

IBM has plans for a 100,000-qubit quantum computer by 2033, partnering with the University of Tokyo and University of Chicago. Quantinuum aims to deliver a fully fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029. These targets suddenly look more significant given Google’s findings.

Another thing to tackle is how much continuous runtime quantum machines support. The hypothetical million-qubit machine Google describes would need to run continuously for days, maintain extremely low error rates, and coordinate billions of operations without interruption. Current quantum computers can barely maintain coherence for minutes—so again, don’t panic.

The quantum threat isn’t immediate, but it’s accelerating faster than expected. The crypto community has already started working on quantum-resistant solutions. Solana developers introduced a quantum-resistant vault using hash-based signatures, while Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed forking the code of current blockchains to protect against quantum threats.

So it seems more likely that we’ll see some sort of anti-quantum hard fork in the future before we witness the first quantum hack of the Bitcoin blockchain—fingers crossed.

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May 27, 2025 0 comments

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The Quest to Prove the Existence of a New Type of Quantum Particle

by admin May 26, 2025

When you swap two paraparticles, these hidden properties change in tandem. As an analogy, imagine that these properties are colors. Start with two paraparticles, one that’s internally red and another that’s internally blue. When they swap places, rather than keeping these colors, they both change in corresponding ways, as prescribed by the mathematics of the particular model. Perhaps the swap leaves them green and yellow. This quickly turns into a complex game, where paraparticles affect each other in unseen ways as they move around.

Meanwhile, Müller was also busy rethinking the DHR theorems. “It’s not always super transparent what they mean, because it’s in a very complicated mathematical framework,” he said.

His team took a new approach to the paraparticle question. The researchers considered the fact that quantum systems can exist in multiple possible states at once—what’s called a superposition. They imagined switching between the perspectives of observers who exist in these superposed states, each of whom describes their branch of reality slightly differently. If two particles are truly indistinguishable, they figured, then it won’t matter if the particles are swapped in one branch of the superposition and not in the other.

“Maybe if the particles are close by, I swap them, but if they are far away I do nothing,” Müller said. “And if they’re in a superposition of both, then I do the swapping in one branch, and nothing in the other branch.” Whether observers across branches label the two particles in the same way should make no difference.

This stricter definition of indistinguishability in the context of superpositions imposes new restrictions on the kinds of particles that can exist. When these assumptions hold, the researchers found that paraparticles are impossible. For a particle to be truly indistinguishable by measurement, as physicists expect elementary particles to be, it must be either a boson or fermion.

Although Wang and Hazzard published their paper first, it’s as though they saw Müller’s constraints coming. Their paraparticles are possible because their model rejects Müller’s starting assumption: The particles are not indistinguishable in the full sense required in the context of quantum superpositions. This comes with a consequence. While swapping two paraparticles has no effect on one person’s measurements, two observers, by sharing their data with each other, can determine whether the paraparticles have been swapped. That’s because swapping paraparticles can change how two people’s measurements relate to each other. In this sense, they could tell the two paraparticles apart.

This means there’s a potential for new states of matter. Where bosons can pack an endless number of particles into the same state, and fermions can’t share a state at all, paraparticles end up somewhere in the middle. They are able to pack just a few particles into the same state, before getting crowded and forcing others into new states. Exactly how many can be crammed together depends on the details of the paraparticle—the theoretical framework allows for endless options.

“I find their paper really fascinating, and there’s absolutely no contradiction with what we do,” Müller said.

The Road to Reality

If paraparticles exist, they’ll most likely be emergent particles, called quasiparticles, that show up as energetic vibrations in certain quantum materials.

“We might get new models of exotic phases, which were difficult to understand before, that you can now solve easily using paraparticles,” said Meng Cheng, a physicist at Yale University who was not involved in the research.

Bryce Gadway, an experimental physicist at Pennsylvania State University who sometimes collaborates with Hazzard, is optimistic that paraparticles will be realized in the lab in the next few years. These experiments would use Rydberg atoms, which are energized atoms with electrons that roam very far from their nuclei. This separation of the positive and negative charge makes Rydberg atoms especially sensitive to electric fields. You can build quantum computers out of interacting Rydberg atoms. They are also the perfect candidates for creating paraparticles.

“For a certain kind of Rydberg quantum simulator, this is kind of just what they would do naturally,” Gadway said about creating paraparticles. “You just prepare them and watch them evolve.”

But for now, the third kingdom of particles remains wholly theoretical.

“Paraparticles might become important,” said Wilczek, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist and inventor of anyons. “But at present they’re basically a theoretical curiosity.”

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

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May 26, 2025 0 comments