Google announced on Dec. 9th that it had developed a new quantum computing chip known as ‘Willow’. The chip performed a computation that would take a supercomputer ten septillion (1025) years in under five minutes. Google’s Quantum AI lead Neven said Willow was a major breakthrough in quantum error correction.There is speculation that the new developments could be a threat to crypto.
Ava Labs founder and CEO Sirer commented on the advancement of quantum computing, stating that the security of digital currencies was intact, at least for now. He, however, expressed his concerns about the technology’s potential threat to Satoshi Nakamoto’s 1M Bitcoin, which utilized the outdated P2PK (pay-to-public-key) format. Sirer said that quantum computing could become a threat because the P2PK format revealed the public key, potentially giving opportunities to attackers.
Google uses more qubits in the new Willow chip to reduce errors
Today we unveiled our latest quantum chip, Willow. But how does quantum computing work? What even is a qubit? Our @GoogleQuantumAI team is here to teach you the basics — and give you a tour of their lab ↓ https://t.co/8ROLn9E2DK
— Google (@Google) December 9, 2024
The Quantum AI team at Google has launched a new quantum computing chip, “Willow.” The chip has reportedly been scaled up with more qubits and can perform fast computations with exponentially reduced errors.
A qubit, aka quantum bit, is the most fundamental unit of information in quantum computing. More qubits lead to higher computational power. Nevertheless, it also increases the possibility of more errors. Therefore, the inflated number of mistakes can give inaccurate results, which makes the technology unreliable for large-scale practical applications like crypto encryption.
According to Hartmut Neven, the lead at Google’s Quantum AI, Willow can exponentially correct errors while performing complex computations at astonishing speed. Willow is powered to find solutions to computational problems within 5 minutes, unlike other supercomputers that would take a thousand quadrillion years to solve a massively complex problem.
“This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe”
–Hartmut Neven
Neven added that this chip can ” drive errors down while scaling up the number of qubits.” He mentions it as overcoming a “key challenge” of quantum problems that experts have been dealing with for “almost 30 years”. The Google Quantum AI team and collaborators clarified that quantum error correction [1, 2, 3, 4] provided a path to achieve practical quantum computing by combining multiple physical qubits into a logical qubit.
Is it a threat to crypto encryption? Experts weigh in on quantum threats to crypto security
The crypto industry has been concerned about progress in quantum computing. These advancements could enable hackers to break crypto encryption, exposing the user’s funds on a large scale. Ava Labs’ Sirer said that while quantum computing is a big leap, it may raise concerns about Willow’s potential threat to crypto encryption.
Tech entrepreneur and former Google senior product manager Kevin Rose argued on Dec. 9 in a post on X that Willow is still far from being a cryptocurrency danger.
He said that to crack Bitcoin’s encryption, a quantum computer with around 13 million qubits would have to complete the task in 24 hours. Google’s Willow chip had only 105 qubits, which, while a significant advancement, was nowhere near the computing power required to crack Bitcoin’s encryption.
Notably, Sirer suggested that the crypto community could consider freezing Satoshi’s Bitcoin when or if quantum computing became a threat. He proposed setting a shutdown date to freeze all tokens on P2PK UTXOs to ensure the security of these digital assets against quantum threats in future.
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