Written by: Blockchain Knight

A new paper released jointly by Google's quantum artificial intelligence and multiple parties has significantly lowered the hardware threshold for cracking the elliptic curve encryption used by Bitcoin and Ethereum, bringing the long-standing quantum security risk closer to the market. At current market prices, the affected cryptocurrency assets exceed $600 billion.

The paper indicates that algorithmically cracking the 256-bit elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem requires only 1,200-1,450 logical qubits and 70 million - 90 million Toffoli gates, corresponding to a superconducting quantum computer needing less than 500,000 physical qubits, completing the crack in just a few minutes, which is about 20 times less than previous hardware estimates.

Google emphasized that there are currently no such machines, but a researcher from the Ethereum Foundation stated that confidence in the "quantum day" in 2032 (when quantum computers have a 10% chance of cracking private keys) has significantly increased.

Google also revealed that it has collaborated with the U.S. government to utilize zero-knowledge proofs for external verification resource estimation while avoiding the disclosure of attack details.

The quantum risk for Bitcoin is primarily focused on transaction attacks and the security of its existing assets. The paper simulates an attack during the spending period, where a quantum computer can derive the private key in 9 minutes, approaching Bitcoin's average block time of 10 minutes, with a theft success rate of nearly 41%.

Worse, about 6.7 million bitcoins (approximately $444 billion, accounting for 32% of the total market value) are stored in vulnerable addresses, including 1.7 million protected by old scripts ($11.26 billion) and various dormant vulnerable bitcoins totaling 2.3 million ($15.23 billion), some of which cannot be migrated due to abandonment or loss.

In addition, while the Taproot protocol enhances privacy, it reintroduces quantum vulnerabilities due to public keys being directly embedded in scripts, and the short-term risk is focused on signatures rather than mining.

The quantum risks for Ethereum span accounts, contracts, and infrastructure. Given Ethereum's 12-second block time and fast transaction processing that relies on private memory pools, real-time transaction attacks are more challenging.

The core risk is static attacks, with fast quantum computers potentially breaking the top 1,000 Ethereum accounts (approximately $41.5 billion) within 9 days and cracking 70 core contract accounts (approximately $5.1 billion) within 15 hours.

Of greater concern is the $200 billion in stablecoins and tokenized assets on Ethereum, where attacks on the issuers, bridges, and other keys could trigger crises such as currency issuance inflation and fund freezes.

Moreover, the $30.4 billion ETH in Layer 2 and protocol value, along with $74.9 billion ETH in consensus equity, also face threats due to vulnerabilities and signature risks.

However, the industry already possesses post-quantum cryptography tools, but migration will take several years and requires protocol upgrades and adjustments in wallet behavior to reduce public key leakage and key reuse.

For the cryptocurrency market, quantum risks have shifted from theory to reality. Bitcoin must contend with settlement window pressures, while Ethereum needs to safeguard its vast contract and tokenized ecosystem. Immediately advancing the migration to post-quantum encryption has become an urgent task for the industry.

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