The post Google accelerates its post-quantum cryptography timeline to 2029 in its latest research appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Google Quantum AI has released research showing that breaking Bitcoin’s encryption may require significantly fewer quantum resources than previously estimated. This discovery could potentially unlock billions of dollars in funds dormant due to private key losses. While Google’s discovery benefits individuals with no access to their fortunes, as Elon Musk promptly pointed out, it also poses a significant risk to the safety of other active wallets.   What did Google discover about quantum computers and Bitcoin? Google Quantum AI’s new whitepaper demonstrates that cracking Bitcoin’s elliptic curve cryptography (secp256k1) requires roughly 20 times fewer quantum resources than previously believed. The research shows an attack could run on approximately 1,200 logical qubits with around 90 million Toffoli gate operations. On a superconducting quantum computer with fewer than 500,000 physical qubits, researchers estimate the attack could recover a private key in minutes, and maybe even faster than Bitcoin’s 10-minute block time. However, today’s most advanced quantum chips have only around 1,000 qubits. The Google team has set a target timeline of 2029 for completing the transition to post-quantum cryptography, which is significantly earlier than previous estimates. In order not to reveal any methods of attack, the company chose not to publish the actual quantum circuits behind its findings and instead had its researchers release a zero-knowledge proof. Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake, who contributed to the paper, said his confidence in “Q-Day” occurring by 2032 has “shot up significantly.” Drake defines Q-Day as the moment a quantum computer successfully recovers an ECDSA private key from an exposed public key. Researchers have identified two distinct attack scenarios.  The first, which will become an immediate threat once powerful enough quantum computers are created, is a mempool attack, where the computer captures public keys from pending transactions, cracks the private key within minutes, and then replaces…

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Filed under: News - @ March 31, 2026 9:24 pm