you're telling me that 7 months ago, a quantum computer cracked a 6-bit elliptic curve key. last week, a researcher cracked 15. and bitcoin uses 256?

every bitcoin wallet is protected by ecdsa, elliptic curve digital signature algorithm.
your private key is the only key to your coins. your public key is the lock's serial number, visible to everyone.
from the public key, you cannot derive the private key. that's what keeps your bitcoin yours.
quantum computers break that. shor's algorithm, run on quantum hardware, can compute the private key from the public key. it's demonstrated. the only open question is how large a key can be cracked.
> sep 2025: first public demo, 6-bit key
> apr 2026: giancarlo lelli cracks a 15-bit key in 45 minutes using 27 qubits, wins a 1 btc bounty
that's a 512x jump in 7 months. bitcoin uses 256 bits. 241 to go.
sounds far. it isn't.
google's april 2026 whitepaper estimates ~500,000 physical qubits to crack a real bitcoin key.
a follow-up paper from caltech and oratomic brought that estimate down to ~10,000 qubits in a neutral-atom setup.
current hardware: ibm has machines with over 1,000 qubits. atom computing has demonstrated arrays of 1,000+ neutral atoms. ibm is targeting 10,000+ modular qubits by end of 2026.
the gap between "what we have" and "what's needed" used to be a wall. researchers themselves now call it "an engineering problem, not a physics problem."
translation: no new physics required. the math works. the hardware just has to scale.
what's at risk:
~$2.5 trillion in crypto assets are secured by ecdsa right now
~1 million btc in satoshi-era wallets already have their public keys exposed onchain, those fall first
every other holder becomes exposed the moment they sign a transaction (the public key gets broadcast)
post-quantum migration for bitcoin has no clean answer yet. switching to a quantum-resistant signature scheme requires coordinated consensus across miners, exchanges, wallets, and node operators. multi-year project.