Mark Webber, a quantum physicist at the University of Sussex, argues that breaking Bitcoin’s encryption will be possible with future supercomputers, Independent Reports.
For now, the leading cryptocurrency is completely safe. Current devices are far from reaching the size needed to hack Bitcoin.
Quantum computers use qubits instead of bits, which allows them to process an infinite amount of data compared to conventional computers.
In November, US technology giant IBM announced a 127-qubit quantum computing chip, breaking the 100-qubit barrier for the first time.
Webber and his colleagues estimate that a quantum computer would need to have at least 13 million qubits to break Bitcoin’s encryption in a day.
Notably, the researchers believe that 300 million qubits will be “achievable” for quantum computers in the future, which would pose the biggest threat to cryptocurrencies.
Our estimated requirement is 30 [million] up to 300 million physical qubits suggests that Bitcoin should be considered safe from a quantum attack, but devices of this size are generally considered achievable and future advances could make reduce requests even further.
Webber believes that Bitcoin has the potential to perform a hard fork to become quantum resistant and troubleshoot its supercomputer in the future, but he also warned of network scaling issues.
The doctoral researcher believes that existing encryption techniques are not secure enough:
People were worried because you can save encrypted messages now and decrypt them in the future.
Bitcoin uses the SHA256 hashing algorithm, developed by the National Security Agency (NSA).
Bitcoin, which turned 13 earlier this January, has been incredibly resilient throughout the years. Security Advisor Dan Kaminsky
famous confession
that he couldn’t hack in 2013.
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