Bitcoin’s price surged on Monday due to a rise in crypto exchange volume, with a +3% daily green candle and a +10% weekly increase. BTC whale wallets also saw an increase in accumulation as President-elect Donald Trump reaffirmed his administration’s plans to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve. However, the development of ultra-fast quantum computing by Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, could pose a threat to the entire blockchain paradigm and potentially Bitcoin’s massive market cap, which is currently valued at over $2 trillion.
Google recently unveiled its Willow quantum computing chip, which, unlike conventional GPUs, can perform computations at much higher speeds. It can solve a problem that would take Frontier, a Hewlett Packard supercomputer, around 10^25 years in just five minutes. This development raises concerns about the safety of Bitcoin.
To understand the math behind a brute force attack on a 256-bit password, YouTube statistician 3Blue1Brown explained that cracking such a level of security would require 4 billion guesses multiplied by itself 8 times. According to 3Blue1Brown’s math, even if every human on Earth had far more computing power than all of Google’s servers and made 4 billion copies of such an Earth in a single galaxy, they would still only have a 1 in 4 billion chance of getting a correct guess.
If a white-collar criminal attempted to steal Bitcoin using this method, the rest of the miners could notice the stolen BTC and correct the ledger by consensus. This would prevent the thieving node from participating in the network. In conclusion, despite the advancements in quantum computing, Bitcoin’s security seems to be still robust, and the concerns about its safety may not be as significant as previously thought.
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