Google Cracks Quantum: Is Your Bitcoin In Jeopardy?

Bitcoin’s price barreled upward Monday on increasing crypto exchange volume, with a +3% daily green candle and a +10% weekly jump.

BTC whale wallets surged in accumulation as president-elect Donald Trump reaffirmed on CNBC that his administration plans to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve.

“We’re gonna do something great with crypto because we don’t want China or anybody else – not just China but others are embracing it – and we want to be the head,” Trump said.

But could advances in ultra-fast quantum computing underway at Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., upend the entire blockchain paradigm?

Along with such rumored devastation, it would likely go much of Bitcoin’s behemoth market cap, currently valued above $2 trillion. Here’s a brief summary of what Alphabet is cooking:

Google’s New Willow Quantum Chip Wows

Google’s Quantum Lab unveiled Willow in a Dec. 9 update on the Google blog.

It’s a quantum computing chip, so each bit can be a 0 and a 1 in different orders of arrangement. Consequently, it can be used to make computations at vastly higher performance speeds than Nvidia’s conventional GPUs, for example.

Google said Willow can solve in just five minutes a problem that would most likely require ten septillion (that is, 10^25) years for Frontier to solve.

Frontier is a Hewlett Packard supercomputer that began operating in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 2022 and was the fastest in the world until it was surpassed by the same company’s El Capitan supercomputer in Alameda, California, in Nov. 2024.

So, are your bitcoins safe?

Bitcoin Cracked? Is Quantum A Crypto Killer?

If you do the math, then you don’t have to worry.

In June 2017, popular YouTube statistician 3Blue1Brown broke down the math of a brute force attack on a 256-bit password. A brute force attack is guessing and testing. Bitcoin uses 256-bit public key encryption for passwords and the miner fee for mining nodes to track and execute transactions.

To crack this level of security with brute force would require a number of guesses around 4 billion times itself 8 times.

By 3Blue1Brown’s math:

If every human on Earth had far more computing power than all of Google’s servers likely have, and then you made 4 billion copies of such an Earth in a single galaxy, and then made 4 billion copies of that galaxy… and all they did with all those computers was brute force attack Bitcoin for 37 times the age of the known universe since the Big Bang, there would still be only a 1 in 4 billion chance of getting a “collision” or correct guess.

And if Google or someone had far more power than that in one server farm and decided to become very white-collar criminals and use that correct guess to steal some bitcoins—well, if the rest of the miners noticed the stolen BTC, they could correct the ledger by consensus and ward off the thieving node from participating in the network.