Not your keys, not your Bitcoin
Everyone know it by now: Not your keys, not your Bitcoin. If you store your Bitcoin on exchange, you will always risk losing them due to bankruptcy, hacks, scams etc. Luckily, most exchanges have good insurance and security measures in place, probably better security than where your cold-storage wallet(s) are stashed away.
Everyone also knows that it is almost impossible to brute-force your way into a Cryptocurrency wallet. Although there are some projects out there that have found private keys of actual bitcoin wallets, such as Keys.lol and the Large Bitcoin Collider, all these finds are based on pure luck. Normally, it would take ages to crack a private key of a wallet.
Google’s Sycamore chip
On the 23d of October, the scientific journal Nature Magazine has published the results of Google’s efforts to build a quantum computer that can perform a task no classical computer can; in other words, “quantum supremacy.” Google’s Sycamore chip performed a computation in 200 seconds that would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years. In more technical terms, this is the abstract of the release paper:
The promise of quantum computers is that certain computational tasks might be executed exponentially faster on a quantum processor than on a classical processor. A fundamental challenge is to build a high-fidelity processor capable of running quantum algorithms in an exponentially large computational space. Here we report the use of a processor with programmable superconducting qubits to create quantum states on 53 qubits, corresponding to a computational state-space of dimension 253 (about 1016). Measurements from repeated experiments sample the resulting probability distribution, which we verify using classical simulations. Our Sycamore processor takes about 200 seconds to sample one instance of a quantum circuit a million times—our benchmarks currently indicate that the equivalent task for a state-of-the-art classical supercomputer would take approximately 10,000 years. This dramatic increase in speed compared to all known classical algorithms is an experimental realization of quantum supremacy for this specific computational task, heralding a much-anticipated computing paradigm.
So the big take-away is that Google’s Quantum Computing chip Sycamore performed a task that would take 10,000+ years, in a little over 3 minutes.
What does this mean for your Bitcoin private keys?
For now, you are still safe. It will still take this Quantum Computer years to brute-force a private key. However, this does mean that quantum computing is a serious factor to consider and with the technology evolving rapidly, the chances are that these years will be reduced to months in the upcoming years. Luckily there are some projects that claim to be Quantum-resistant, by employing quantum-resistant algorithms, such as QRL, Hcash and Iota.
Time will tell, but stay safe!
If you want to compare wallets, you can do that here.