Satoshi-era bitcoin faces a bigger quantum threat after Google’s new Willow breakthrough
Google's recent 'Willow' quantum computing breakthrough has intensified concerns regarding the security of early Bitcoin holdings. Experts warn that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could theoretically use Shor's algorithm to reverse-engineer private keys from exposed public keys.
Why it matters
This development highlights a critical long-term vulnerability for legacy cryptocurrency wallets, potentially threatening the security of billions of dollars in early Bitcoin assets.
The result, published in Science this week, deals with something that rarely comes up in the bitcoin quantum debate — which usually focuses on how big a machine an attacker would need while underplaying how much of that machine would be occupied getting ready to calculate.
A bitcoin wallet uses a secret key to approve payments and a matching public key that lets the network check those approvals. Spending typically reveals the public key, while some payment types expose it from the start.
Working backward from it to the secret is supposed to take an impractical amount of computing, which makes it practically impossible to reverse-engineer crypto wallets.
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