Satoshi-era bitcoin faces a bigger quantum threat after Google’s new Willow breakthrough
Google says its Willow chip can prepare the special quantum states needed for advanced calculations with about 40 times fewer errors, reducing one of the hardware bottlenecks behind any future attempt to crack bitcoin wallets.
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Summary
- Google said its Willow quantum chip reduced errors about 40-fold when preparing “magic states,” a resource needed for quantum calculations that could eventually threaten Bitcoin wallets.
- The experiment achieved about 99.99 percent fidelity among states that passed inspection, though only about 8 percent of preparation attempts succeeded and substantial scaling challenges remain.
- The findings do not make a Bitcoin attack 40 times cheaper, but they advance an engineering method that could help future quantum computers sustain the roughly 500,000 reliable magic states per second required under one modeled attack.
