TLDR Tech / InfoSec
Google's Quantum Crypto Paper Tells You Quite a Lot
Google Quantum AI recently dropped a whitepaper with a headline finding that the cryptography that secures Bitcoin and most of the crypto ecosystem can be broken using fewer than half a million physical qubits on a superconducting architecture in about nine minutes. The company withheld the specific quantum circuit used in the name of responsible disclosure, but the paper constrains the search space so tightly that reproducing comparable circuits is well within reach for any serious quantum algorithms group. The qubit counts that make these cryptographic attacks feasible are roughly the same number of qubits required to make quantum-enhanced AI feasible. This suggests that the threat and capability of quantum computing will arrive roughly on the same timescale.
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