4 million BTC worth more than $ 28.5 billion are likely at risk from quantum attacks

By Dorothy 12/21/19 9:14 AM

There have long been stories about bitcoin at risk of being wiped out by quantum computing. But they are specifically enforced by Google’s recent announcement of its supercomputer achieving quantum supremacy. The topic that is now hotter than ever is that many people are starting to wonder if quantum computing is really dangerous for BTC.

4 million BTC worth more than $ 28.5 billion (as Stash mentioned) are potentially at risk from quantum attacks.

Bitcoin at risk

According to Deloitte researchers, people are not using or reusing p2pk addresses anymore and there are still 4 million BTC still vulnerable. In other words, this is how much BTC can be affected and endangered by quantum computing. The researchers said that all bitcoins in the ‘pay to public key’ (p2pk) addresses, as well as p2pkh addresses (paid for public key hashes), are in danger.

P2pk addresses were used to store pretty much BTC in the early days, including coins mined by Bitcoin Bitcoin creators. Some estimates say that such addresses contain about 2 million BTC. In other words, these are bitcoins that are directly mined and left in wallets for years.

However, when p2pkh appeared in 2010, it was preferred over p2pk and most of the coins created in the last 10 years were stored in these addresses. However, the number of bitcoins stored in such addresses is said to be around 2.5 million BTC.

Now, there’s been a lot of speculation about whether quantum computers will kill bitcoin, and the answer seems to be no. Or at least, not immediately, because quantum computing has more development to undergo before it becomes a real threat to BTC. This has led to many conversations regarding how the cryptocurrency industry can prepare for the so-called “quantum supremacy”.

What is quantum computing?

Quantum Computing: it sounds like the future because until recently, it was. But today, we have marked an important milestone in quantum computing research that opens up new possibilities for this technology.

Unlike classical computing, which runs everything from mobile phones to supercomputers, quantum computing is based on the properties of quantum mechanics. Therefore, quantum computers are capable of solving problems that are too difficult or even impossible for classical computers. As a better battery design, find out which molecule can make drugs efficient or minimize emissions from making fertilizer. They can also help improve existing advanced technologies such as machine learning.

Science magazine Nature has announced the result of Google’s efforts to build a quantum computer that can perform a task that no classical computer can do. This is known in the field as the quantum supreme of the user. In fact, our chip, called Sycamore, performed a calculation in 200 seconds, which would make the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years.

Quantum computing and Bitcoin

So what does quantum computing have to do with Bitcoin? Can people theoretically break Bitcoin with quantum computation? The short answer is no, but quantum computing will probably bring some problems to be solved. As a general assumption, it is unlikely that quantum computing will be available to mainstream users within the next ten years at an affordable or effective price to try to ruin the security of Bitcoin or steal money from users.

Two things in Bitcoin could be affected by the advent of quantum computers. The first is the security of elliptic curve cryptography systems when used to sign transactions, and the second is the hash function itself.