British researchers argue that hacking Bitcoin with quantum computers could be possible in the future
Mark Webber, a quantum physicist at the University of Sussex, says breaking Bitcoin’s encryption would be possible with futuristic supercomputers, reports The Independent.
For now, the flagship cryptocurrency is perfectly safe. Existing devices are far from achieving the size required to hack Bitcoin.
Quantum computers use qubits instead of bits, allowing them to process infinitely more data than ordinary computers.
In November, U.S. tech giant IBM unveiled a 127-qubit quantum computing chip, breaking the 100-qubit barrier for the first time.
Webber and his colleague estimate that a quantum computer would need at least 13 million qubits to crack Bitcoin’s encryption in one day.
Notably, the researchers believe that 300 million qubits would be “achievable” for quantum computers in the future, which will pose a threat to the largest cryptocurrency.
Our estimated need of 30 [million] at 300 million physical qubits suggests that Bitcoin should be considered immune to quantum attack for now, but devices of this size are generally considered feasible, and future progress could lower the requirements even further.
Webber believes that Bitcoin could potentially perform a hard fork in order to become quantum-resistant and fix its supercomputer problem in the future, but he also warns of network scaling issues.
The doctoral student is convinced that the existing encryption techniques are not sufficiently secure:
People are already worried because you can save encrypted messages right now and decrypt them in the future.
Bitcoin uses the SHA256 hashing algorithm, which was developed by the National Security Agency (NSA).
Bitcoin, which turned 13 earlier this January, has been incredibly resilient throughout all these years. The late security expert Dan Kaminsky famously confessed that he couldn’t hack in 2013.
