Key Points
- Google’s subsidiary, Alphabet Inc, has introduced a new quantum chip named Willow.
- Despite concerns, experts believe Willow is not powerful enough to pose a threat to Bitcoin’s security.
Alphabet Inc, under Google, has launched Willow, its newest quantum chip. There is speculation that Willow could potentially disrupt Bitcoin’s dominance due to its impressive capabilities.
Willow’s Quantum Capabilities
Willow, developed by Google, is a highly potent quantum supercomputer. It can perform certain computational tasks in just five minutes, tasks that would take classical supercomputers 10 septillion years. This duration is significantly larger than the entire existence of the world, which is 13.8 billion years.
The American multinational corporation has described Willow as a “state-of-the-art” chip. It showcases error correction and performance, setting the stage for a functional, large-scale quantum computer. This level of sophistication could render passwords obsolete.
Encrypted messages could easily be intercepted, including nuclear weapon codes. Essentially, anything with a secret key could easily be unlocked through brute-forcing combinations of numbers and letters.
Many believe that Willow has the potential to crack Bitcoin’s complex math algorithm SHA-256, thereby compromising the network.
Willow’s power lies in its qubits, which can reach up to 105, equivalent to improved error rates. Unlike traditional bits that represent either a 0 or 1, qubits can represent both simultaneously due to quantum phenomena like superposition and entanglement.
The presence of qubits allows quantum computers to run at a very high speed, performing multiple calculations at once. They could eventually solve problems currently intractable for classical computers.
However, Bitcoin’s SHA-256 for mining and ECDSA for signatures are believed to be highly vulnerable to quantum decryption.
Bitcoin Remains Unthreatened
Despite these concerns, some experts believe that Willow’s threat to Bitcoin is unfounded. Based on their analysis, Google’s latest quantum computing chip needs to be even more powerful to pose a risk, at least not yet. Therefore, Bitcoin might not face any immediate risks.
“Experts estimate you’d need about 1 million high-quality qubits to make a dent in Bitcoin’s security,” explained Cinemad Producer, a pseudonymous analyst and tech expert.
Therefore, even as advanced as Willow, quantum computers lack the necessary scale or error correction capabilities to decrypt widely used encryption methods immediately. They hardly stand a chance against RSA, ECC used in Bitcoin transactions, or even AES in securing data.
Should quantum computers reach a scale that can factor in large numbers, they could break these encryption schemes. This would compromise wallet security and transaction integrity. Until then, Bitcoin faces no immediate challenge.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s price briefly dipped, losing some of its gains in heavy crypto liquidations. From trading at over $97,000 during the early hours of Monday, the firstborn crypto asset plunged to $94,000. Since then, BTC price has recovered slightly and is currently trading at $97,304.83.
