Google's quantum chip Willow is released, and under the threat of supercomputing power, should we freeze the 1 million bitcoins held by Satoshi Nakamoto for security?

Author: Weilin, PANews

On December 10, Google introduced its latest quantum chip, Willow, in an official blog post, reigniting discussions in the crypto community about quantum computing attacks. Will quantum computing undermine existing encryption security mechanisms, particularly posing a threat to mainstream cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin?

Partly influenced by this news, as of December 10 at 14:20, data from Coinglass indicated that a sharp correction in the crypto market triggered $1.758 billion in liquidations within 24 hours.

Google Launches Latest Quantum Chip "Willow"

In the blog post, Google announced that the "Willow" quantum chip achieved two significant milestones. First, with an increasing number of qubits (the unit of quantum information), Willow can achieve exponential error rate reduction, overcoming a key challenge in quantum error correction that has been pursued for nearly 30 years. Second, Willow completed a standard benchmark calculation in less than five minutes, while the same calculation task would take even the fastest supercomputers today 10^25 years to complete, a number far exceeding the age of the universe.

"This provides credible support for the idea of quantum computing occurring in multiple parallel universes, which aligns with our theory of living in a multiverse, a prediction first proposed by David Deutsch," said Hartmut Neven, founder and head of Google Quantum AI, in the blog.

Qubits are the fundamental units of information and the core of quantum computing; the more qubits there are, the stronger the computing power. However, increasing the number of qubits also brings a higher risk of errors. If the error rate is too high, computations become unreliable and produce incorrect results, making it difficult for quantum technology to achieve practical large-scale applications.

On December 9, Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated in a post on X that Willow is an important step in Google's journey to create a "practical quantum computer," with potential applications in drug development, nuclear fusion energy, and battery design.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk expressed admiration for Google's invention in response to Pichai's tweet. Pichai replied that they would collaborate on quantum clusters for Starship in the future.

Is Cryptocurrency Security Under Threat? Mixed Opinions

Does Willow pose a threat to cryptocurrencies? The progress of quantum computing has long been seen as a potential turning point for the crypto industry. If quantum computers can crack current encryption algorithms, they could quickly expose user funds, leading to significant theft risks. However, opinions on this matter vary.

Tech entrepreneur and former senior product manager at Google, Kevin Rose, stated in a post on X on December 9 that Willow currently does not pose a threat to cryptocurrencies. Rose pointed out that it is estimated that cracking Bitcoin's encryption would require a quantum computer with about 13 million qubits to complete the decryption in 24 hours. "In contrast, while Google's Willow chip is an important advancement, it only has 105 qubits," he said.

Emin Gün Sirer, founder of Avalanche, stated this morning that the latest developments in quantum computing are indeed impressive, but at least for now, they do not pose a threat to the security of cryptocurrencies. Current quantum computing is only suitable for executing a few types of tasks, such as digital factorization, and cannot reverse one-way hash functions. The designs of mainstream blockchains, including Bitcoin and Avalanche, possess certain quantum resistance, with short public key exposure times, leaving attackers with a limited computational window. Therefore, in the short term, quantum computing still cannot threaten cryptocurrencies. In the future, when quantum threats do arise, blockchains like Avalanche can quickly add quantum-resistant signatures.

Dragonfly partner Haseeb Qureshi shares a similar view and cited a report from Metaculus indicating that Shor's algorithm is not expected to achieve the first RSA key cracking until around 2040.

Another Bitcoin OG, Ben Sigman, also pointed out in his post on X that Bitcoin users should not worry about this invention, stating that "cryptographic technology is still secure… at least for now."

Nevertheless, David Marcus, CEO of payment platform Lightspark, expressed that he believes most people "have not fully understood" the significance of Google's breakthrough. Marcus noted that this means "post-quantum encryption and cryptographic technology need to accelerate their development."

In fact, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed a method to mitigate quantum computing risks, explaining in a March post on X that this issue can be resolved through a simple hard fork. Buterin stated that the blockchain needs to undergo a hard fork, and users will need to download new wallet software, with most users not losing their funds.

Quantum Computing and Bitcoin, Experts Suggest Freezing Satoshi's 1 Million BTC

The proof-of-work (POW) mechanism, crucial to Bitcoin operations, requires miners to solve complex mathematical problems to verify transactions and ensure network security. However, quantum computing, with its unprecedented computing speed, could threaten this balance.

Quantum algorithms like Grover's algorithm theoretically can solve these problems faster than traditional computers. Thus, this technology has the potential to centralize mining power, undermining Bitcoin's decentralization principle.

According to estimates by Dan A. Bard, a faculty member at the University of Kent, the hash rate of the Bitcoin network is growing at the same rate as the current value of quantum computing technology, according to Moore's Law, and it is estimated that it will take about 27 years until a single quantum computer can completely surpass other miners in the network, thereby gaining full control over it.

Moreover, Bitcoin's elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), which is a key technology for protecting wallet addresses, also faces risks. Quantum computers may use Shor's algorithm in the future to crack ECC, exposing Bitcoin transactions to potential security vulnerabilities. This vulnerability particularly affects well-known early addresses, including a significant portion of Bitcoin held by Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder of Bitcoin.

Emin Gün Sirer mentioned this more severe scenario in response to Haseeb's post: "Haseeb reminded me that Satoshi's 1 million Bitcoins may indeed face quantum threat issues. Early Bitcoin used a very old Pay-To-Public-Key format, which leaks the public key, giving attackers time to study it, which is the source of all cryptographic bounties. Modern Bitcoin wallets or modern systems like Avalanche do not use P2P K, but it did exist in the early stages of Bitcoin. Therefore, as quantum threats intensify, the Bitcoin community may need to consider freezing Satoshi's 1 million Bitcoins, or more generally, providing a final date and freezing all Bitcoins on P2P K UTXOs."

"Once the public key is exposed, a Shor algorithm adjusted for ECDSA can run on an ideal quantum computer to find the public key in polynomial time. In traditional methods, the process of finding a solution is super-polynomial, taking several orders of magnitude longer… Polynomial time is potentially feasible, and researchers speculate that ECDSA will eventually be cracked by quantum computers," researchers from Acheron Trading wrote.

Meanwhile, the Bitcoin community seems unlikely to shift from the proof-of-work (POW) mechanism to alternative consensus mechanisms like proof-of-stake (POS). Even cryptographer Adam Back stated that PoS cryptocurrencies lack immutability, decentralization, and verifiable high production costs, emphasizing their fundamental differences from Bitcoin.

"As hard currency, it is immutable, decentralized, and has verifiable production costs. The technological structure is designed to make it economically stable and actually very difficult to modify. PoS coins do not have these characteristics; they have CEOs and dozens of competitors. Bitcoin has only one," Back stated.

This resistance to change reflects the Bitcoin community's concern about the quantum threat and the importance of responding to it. Although the threat of quantum computing has not fully materialized, proactive measures remain key to protecting the Bitcoin network from future quantum attacks.

However, some others, including some quantum computer developers, believe that such concerns are unnecessary. By the time quantum computers become reliable and powerful enough to attack Bitcoin, blockchain developers will have already patched these vulnerabilities.