There’s been a lot of noise around this, but let’s get one thing straight, Google never claimed Bitcoin is about to collapse overnight. That narrative is completely overblown.
What their researchers actually highlighted is something more subtle, but far more important. They suggest that the quantum hardware required to break elliptic-curve cryptography (the type Bitcoin relies on) might not be as unrealistic as earlier believed. Their latest findings indicate that such an attack could be executed with fewer than 1,200 logical qubits. Under certain assumptions, it may even require under 500,000 physical qubits and could run within minutes. That’s roughly a 20x reduction compared to older projections.
Now, don’t misunderstand this. Logical qubits are highly refined, error-corrected systems built from many physical qubits. So this isn’t Google saying “we can do this today.” It’s more like saying, “this problem might be solvable sooner than we thought.”
The fact that Google is internally targeting around 2029 for transitioning to post-quantum systems shows they’re taking this seriously.
It’s Not About “Breaking Encryption” the Way People Think
The phrase “quantum computers will break Bitcoin encryption” gets thrown around a lot, but it’s a simplified
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