As with any quantum computing news, I will wait for Scott Aaronson to tell me what to think about this.
replies(6):
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09526-6
In the last sentence of the abstract you will find:
"These results ... indicate a viable path to practical quantum advantage."
And in the conclusions:
"Although the random circuits used in the dynamic learning demonstration remain a toy model for Hamiltonians that are of practical relevance, the scheme is readily applicable to real physical systems."
So the press release is a little over-hyped. But this is real progress nonetheless (assuming the results actually hold up).
[UPDATE] It should be noted that this is still a very long way away from cracking RSA. That requires quantum error correction, which this work doesn't address at all. This work is in a completely different regime of quantum computing, looking for practical applications that use a quantum computer to simulate a physical quantum system faster than a classical computer can. The hardware improvements that produced progress in this area might be applicable to QEC some day, this is not direct progress towards implementing Shor's algorithm at all. So your crypto is still safe for the time being.
It would be a pain to manage but it would be safe from quantum computing.
Where is the exact threat?
I'll add this to my list of useful phrases.
Q: Hey AndrewStephens, you promised that task would be completed two days ago. Can you finish it today?
A: Results indicate a viable path to success.
No amount of software fixes can update this. In theory once an attack becomes feasible on the horizon they could update to post-quantum encryption and offer the ability to transfer from old-style addresses to new-style addresses, but this would be a herculean effort for everyone involved and would require all holders (not miners) to actively update their wallets. Basically infeasible.
Fortunately this will never actually happen. It's way more likely that ECDSA is broken by mundane means (better stochastic approaches most likely) than quantum computing being a factor.
Im pretty reluctant to make any negative comments about these kinds of posts be cause it will prevent actually achieving the desired outcome.
The problem is not with these papers (or at least not ones like this one) but how they are reported. If quantum computing is going to suceed it needs to do the baby steps before it can do the big steps, and at the current rate the big leaps are probably decades away. There is nothing wrong with that, its a hard problem and its going to take time. But then the press comes in and reports that quantum computing is going to run a marathon tomorrow which is obviously not true and confuses everyone.
A nice benefit is it solves the problem with Satoshi’s (of course not a real person or owner) wallet. Satoshi’s wallet becomes the defacto quantum advantage prize. That’s a lot of scratch for a research lab.
Any rational economic actor would participate in a post-quantum hard fork because the alternative is losing all their money.
If this was a company with a $2 trillion market cap there'd be no question they'd move heaven-and-earth to prevent the stock from going to zero.
Y2K only cost $500 billion[1] adjusted for inflation and that required updating essentially every computer on Earth.
But as far as moving balances - it's up to the owners. It would start with anybody holding a balance high enough to make it worth the amount of money it would take to crack a single key. That cracking price will go down, and the value of BTC may go up. People can move over time as they see fit.
So we are all in a collective flap that someone can see my bank transactions? These are pretty much public knowledge to governments/central banks/clearing houses anyway -- doesn't seem like all that big a deal to me.
(I work on payment processing systems for a large bank)
As far as i am aware, eliptic curve is also vulnerable to quantum attacks.
The threat is generally both passive eavesdropping to decrypt later and also active MITM attacks. Both of course require the attacker to be in a position to eavesdrop.
> Let’s say you crack the encryption key used in my bank between a java payment processing system and a database server.
Well if you are sitting in the right place on the network then you can.
> how do you mitm this traffic?
Depends on the scenario. If you are government or ISP then its easy. Otherwise it might be difficult. Typical real life scenarios are when the victim is using wifi and the attacker is in the physical vicinity.
Like all things crypto, it always depends on context. What information are you trying to protect and who are you trying to protect.
All that said, people are already experimenting with PQC so it might mostly be moot by the time a quantum computer comes around. On the other hand people are still using md5 so legacy will bite.
This paper on verifiable advantage is a lot more compelling. With Scott Aaronson and Quantinuum among other great researchers
if you can read the TLS session in general, you can capture the TLS session ticket and then use that to make a subsequent connection. This is easier as you dont have to be injecting packets live or make inconvinent packets disappear.
The MBA wakes up, sees the fire, sees a fire extinguisher in the corner of the room, empties the fire extinguisher to put out the fire, then goes back to sleep.
The engineer wakes up, sees the fire, sees the fire extinguisher, estimates the extent of the fire, determines the exact amount of foam required to put it out including a reasonable tolerance, and dispenses exactly that amount to put out the fire, and then satisified that there is enough left in case of another fire, goes back to sleep.
The quantum computing physicist wakes up, sees the fire, observes the fire extinguisher, determines that there is a viable path to practical fire extinguishment, and goes back to sleep.
Not really. This would be if not instantly then when a batch goes for clearing or reconciliation, be caught -- and an investigation would be immediately started.
There are safeguards against this kind of thing that can't be really defeated by breaking some crypto. We have to protect against malicious employees etc also.
One can not simply insert bank transactions like this. They are really extremely complicated flows here.
I think this is all overhyped though. It seems likely we will have plenty of warning to migrate prior to achieving big enough quantum computers to steal wallets. Per wikipedia:
> The latest quantum resource estimates for breaking a curve with a 256-bit modulus (128-bit security level) are 2330 qubits and 126 billion Toffoli gates.
IIRC this is speculated to be the reason ECDSA was selected for Bitcoin in the first place.
Somehow, I'm not all that scared. Perhaps I'm naive.. :}
These are fairly robust systems. You'd likely have a much better impact dossing the banks.
[1] - https://github.com/jlopp/bips/blob/quantum_migration/bip-pos...
The current situation with "AI" took off because people learned their lessons from the last round of funding cuts "AI winter".
That being said any pushback against funding quantum research would be like chopped your own hands off.
So I do not think these tools or economic substrate layers are going anywhere. They are very valuable for the particular kinds of applications that can be built with them and also as additional productive layers to the credit and liquidity markets nationally, internationally, and also globally/universally.
So there is a lot of institutional interest, including governance interest, in using them to build better systems. Bitcoin on its own would be reduced in such justification but because of Ethereum's function as an engine which can drive utility, the two together are a formidable and quantum-resistant platform that can scale into the hundreds of trillions of dollars and in Ethereum's case...certainly beyond $1Q in time.
I'm very bullish on the underlying technology, even beyond tokenomics for any particular project. The underlying technologies are powerful protocols that facilitate the development and deployment of Non Zero Sum systems at scale. With Q-Day not expected until end of 2020s or beginning of 2030s, that is a considerable amount of time (in the tech world) to lay the ground work for further hardening and discussions around this.
It doesn't require all holders to update their wallets. Some people would fail to do so and lose their money. That doesn't mean the rest of the network can't do anything to save themselves. Most people use hosted wallets like Coinbase these days anyway, and Coinbase would certainly be on top of things.
Also, you don't need to break ECDSA to break BTC. You could also do it by breaking mining. The block header has a 32-bit nonce at the very end. My brain is too smooth to know how realistic this actually is, but perhaps someone could do use a QC to perform the final step of SHA-256 on all 2^32 possible values of the nonce at once, giving them an insurmountable advantage in mining. If only a single party has that advantage, it breaks the Nash equilibrium.
But if multiple parties have that advantage, I suppose BTC could survive until someone breaks ECDSA. All those mining ASICs would become worthless, though.
Even as a Googler I can find plenty of reasons to be cynical about Google (many involving AI), but the quantum computing research lab is not one of them. It's actual scientific research, funded (I assume) mostly out of advertising dollars, and it's not building something socially problematic. So why all the grief?
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9098
Aaronson did work at OpenAI but not on image generation, maybe you could argue the OpenAI safety team he worked on should be involved here but I'm pretty sure image generation was after his time, and even if he did work directly on image generation under NDA or something, attributing that cartoon to Aaronson would be like attributing a cartoon made in Photoshop by an antisemite to a random Photoshop programmer, unless he maliciously added antisemitic images to the training data or something.
The most charitable interpretation that I think Aaronson also has offered is that Aaronson believed Woit was an antisemite because of a genocidal chain of events that in Aaronson's belief would necessarily happen with a democratic solution and that even if Woit didn't believe that that would be the consequence, or believed in democracy deontologically and thought the UN could step in under the genocide convention if any genocide began to be at risk of unfolding, the intent of Woit could be dismissed, and Woit could therefore be somehow be lumped in with the antisemite who sent Aaronson the image.
Aaronson's stated belief also is that any claim that Isreal was commiting a genocide in the last few years is a blood-libel because he believes the population of Gaza is increasing and it can't be a genocide unless there is a population decrease during the course of it. This view of Aaronsno would imply things like if every male in Gaza was sterilized, and the UN stepped in and stopped it as a genocide, it would be a blood libel to call that genocide so long as the population didn't decrease during the course of it, even if it did decrease afterwards. But maybe he would clarify that it could include decreases that happen with a delayed effect of the actions. But these kind of strong beliefs of blood-libel I think are part of why he felt ok labeling the comic with Woit's name.
I also don't think if the population does go down or has been going down he will say it was from a genocide, but rather that populations can go down from war. He's only proposing that a population must go down as a necessary criteria of genocide, not a sufficient one. I definitely don't agree with him, to me if Hamas carried out half of an Oct 7 every day it would clearly be a genocide even if that brought the replacement rate to 1.001 and it wouldn't change anything if it brought it to 0.999.
> guywithahat [...] I'll be waiting for Scott Adams to tell me what to think about this
Scott Adams
Text adventure guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams_(game_designer)
Batshit cartoonist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams
(also, for fun, a cartoon by Scott Aaronson and Zack Weinersmith: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3)
I turned 50 years old this year, forgive an old man a few chuckles.
I am unaware of any comics Aaronson made and I don't blame him for anything he did make or was loosely associated with. It is incredible to the extend people are willing to go to claim people are crazy though, both in regards to Adams and Aaronson.
I don't see why it wouldn't look like normal traffic.
> Somehow, I'm not all that scared. Perhaps I'm naive.. :}
We're talking about an attack that probably won't be practical for another 20 years , which already has counter measures that are in testing right now. Almost nobody should be worried about it.
It should be noted that according to IonQ's roadmap, they're targeting 2030 for computers capable of that. That's only about 5 years sooner than when the government has said everyone has to move to post quantum.