Quantum Computing Got 20x Closer. It Threatens A Third of All Bitcoin

**Laura Shin** (0:03)
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Today's topic is the threat that quantum computing poses to crypto and why it may arrive a lot more quickly than people have been expecting. Here to discuss are Alex Pruden, co-founder and CEO of Project Eleven, and Dolev Bluvstein, CEO of Oratomic. Welcome, Alex and Dolev.

**Alex Pruden** (1:02)
It's a pleasure to be here.

**Dolev Bluvstein** (1:04)
It's a great pleasure.

**Laura Shin** (1:06)
So the two big news stories this morning, they are about breakthroughs in quantum computing, and these likely change the timeline for when crypto and blockchains need to have post quantum technology. And that deadline is now three years away, at least according to this Google paper. So that's 2029
Google announced it had published this white paper showing that future quantum computers could break elliptic curve cryptography, which cures certain crypto assets, for example, the public keys and Bitcoin and Ethereum. They actually didn't fully describe the vulnerabilities and how they did this. What they did was they provided a zero-knowledge proof that they had done this to keep bad actors from using information. Alex, can you start by telling us more about this news and what it means for the cryptocurrency community?

**Alex Pruden** (1:59)
Yeah, absolutely.
There's a couple of notable pieces. First off, first thing that was notable was Google. Google and not just Google, but a member of the Ethereum Foundation, actually, Justin Drake, who leads the Ethereum Foundation, was a co-author, as well as Dan Boneh, who's a prominent Stanford professor. I think that lends some credibility to, I think what some have been saying about this problem for a while. That's thing one. Thing two, you already mentioned, it was a zero-knowledge proof. They described the circuit or the rough approach. They did that explicitly because they believed that, hey, they didn't want a bad actor to use this. The third thing that I would say is the analysis that they did was very comprehensive. I think I would encourage everyone to at least read the abstract or even skim the paper if you're in digital assets because they covered quite a breadth of potential attack factors that is not often discussed. In addition to Bitcoin, Satoshi's Bitcoin, that's always what comes up in the quantum conversation. They talk about things like stable coins. Some people mention, but even systems like zero-knowledge proof systems or data availability systems for layer 2s, all of those are covered and explicitly the vulnerabilities to a quantum computer are described.
I would say the totality of the vulnerability was a key takeaway. I think it makes sense if you think about it. You said elliptic curve cryptography. Elliptic curve cryptography is the foundation of pretty much all digital assets. It's the foundation of all digital assets because it's been proven to be secure classically, and it's generally really performance. Everyone's gotten really used to elliptic curve cryptography, and it's gotten built into all of these things. I think the Google paper just by saying, hey, all of these things are broken, but it really is saying elliptic curve cryptography might be broken, but it was describing the implications, which I think has been good. I don't think there's anyone who's done quite as good of a job of describing all the ways in which it has an impact.

**Laura Shin** (4:00)
Yeah. I was reading this and I was like, wow, Google knows a lot about crypto assets.

**Alex Pruden** (4:06)
Well, Dan does know a lot about crypto assets.

**Laura Shin** (4:10)
That is true. And Justin contributed. So the other bit of news involves your company, Dolev or Atomic. And you announced that you have your own breakthrough in the quantum computing world. Can you share what it is that your company announced?

**Dolev Bluvstein** (4:27)
Yes. So we put out a paper on Archive. It is not yet peer-reviewed, although we believe that the results are technically sound. And the title of the paper is Shor's algorithm is possible, with as few as 10,000 reconfigurable atomic qubits. There's a lot to unpack there. At a high level, what I will say is that I know there's been a lot of talk about quantum computers for a long time, and it always is one of those things that's 10 years away, and there's a lot of promises that quantum companies make, et cetera. But it's clear that we're crossing a moment, that it's going to actually be different, and it's exciting because we'll be able to soon build useful quantum computers, but it's also concerning because they could also quite soon become cryptographically relevant. And I think the best way of capturing that is that a decade ago, the best guess we had in terms of, or the best calculations we had in terms of how to build a cryptographically relevant quantum computer was that we would need a billion noisy physical qubits to make what we call error corrected qubits. I can explain what that means if that's of interest. But we needed a billion qubits, and at a time when we had systems of as large as five qubits, now with this recent work, we see that we can actually do things with as few as 10,000 qubits using novel approaches to the error correction, which I can describe if interested. And we have systems in the lab that up to some subtleties are getting as large as 6,000 atomic qubits. These, you know, there's a lot of steps still before you can actually fully assemble this into a cryptographically relevant quantum computer, but it is starting to become substantially closer.