Quantum computers would need to be roughly a million times more powerful to have the ability to crack Bitcoin’s SHA-256 hashing algorithm. According to New Scientist.
PhD student Mark Webber from the University of Sussex (Britain) and his colleagues studied what quantum computer, in terms of the number of qubits would be required to decrypt the cryptographic key of a transaction.
“The transaction is open and the key is linked to it. There is a finite window during which it is vulnerable. The window varies, but it is usually from 10 minutes to an hour, perhaps a day,” Webber explained.
The team calculated that cracking Bitcoin’s encryption in 10 minutes would require a quantum computer with 1.9 billion qubits. With one hour available, the figure falls to 317 million qubits, and even with a day it would be 13 million qubits.
Given that the most powerful quantum computer on the market is 127-qubit model from IBM, these devices do not yet pose a threat to the cryptocurrency.
In conventional computing, Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years. But in quantum computing it is replaced by Neven’s Law. According to the empirical observations of the German scientist, the power of quantum computers grows according to a double-exponential function.
By comparison, such a trajectory in conventional computing would have given us modern desktops and laptops as early as the 1970s.
Under Neven’s Law, over time quantum computers will reach power levels that pose a potential threat to Bitcoin’s encryption. However Webber believes this will not happen within the next decade.
In 2021, IBM signed a £210 million deal with the UK government to the creation of a quantum computing centre and artificial intelligence.
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