Hacking News
Google’s Willow Breakthrough Raises Quantum Threat to Bitcoin Wallets
Google has announced a breakthrough with its Willow quantum chip, reducing errors in preparing special states used in quantum calculations by about 40 times. This addresses a significant step towards building quantum computers powerful enough to potentially crack bitcoin wallets. Bitcoin wallets use a secret key for approving payments and a matching public key for network verification. An attacker with a large enough quantum computer running Shor's algorithm could theoretically reverse-engineer crypto wallets by recovering the secret key and signing transactions as the owner. This highlights a potential vulnerability in bitcoin's security model, especially for older and lost coins.