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Google Says Quantum Threats to Bitcoin Could Arrive Sooner Than Expected
Quantum computers may be able to break the cryptography behind Bitcoin sooner than many investors expect, according to a Monday blog post and newly published whitepaper from Google's Quantum AI team. The researchers argue the resources needed to attack Bitcoin's security could be materially lower than past assumptions, reviving questions about how quickly quantum risks could shift from theoretical to practical.
In the paper, Google's team estimates that compromising the cryptographic schemes used by Bitcoin and Ethereum could take fewer than 500,000 physical quantum bits (qubits), far below the "millions" often cited in recent years. Google has previously flagged 2029 as a potential inflection point for useful quantum systems, and has said migration efforts need to happen before then, making the lower resource estimate more consequential.
Google also proposes two attack approaches that would require roughly 1,200 to 1,450 high-quality qubits. The team says that is only a fraction of earlier projections and suggests the distance between current hardware and a credible attack may be smaller than commonly believed.
The research focuses on a real-time threat model rather than older wallets. When a user sends bitcoin, the public key is briefly revealed. A sufficiently fast quantum machine could use that public key to derive the private key and redirect the funds. Under Google's model, an attacker could precompute part of the work, then finish the attack in about nine minutes once a transaction appears. With Bitcoin transactions typically taking around 10 minutes to confirm, the paper estimates an attacker would have about a 41% chance of beating the original transfer. Faster-confirming networks such as Ethereum may be less exposed to this specific window.
The paper also estimates roughly 6.9 million bitcoin—about one-third of total supply—are already held in wallets where the public key has been exposed in some way. That includes around 1.7 million bitcoin from Bitcoin's early years and coins affected by address reuse. The estimate is well above a recent CoinShares view that only about 10,200 bitcoin are concentrated enough to significantly move markets if stolen.
Google's findings also put fresh scrutiny on Taproot, Bitcoin's 2021 upgrade. Taproot improved privacy and efficiency, but it also made public keys visible on-chain by default, removing a protection layer present in older address formats. The researchers say that design choice could broaden the set of wallets vulnerable to future quantum attacks.
On disclosure, Google said it avoided publishing step-by-step instructions for breaking crypto systems. Instead, the team used a zero-knowledge proof to demonstrate the results are valid without revealing the underlying method, allowing independent verification while limiting misuse.
For investors, Google's message is not that quantum computers are about to crack crypto tomorrow, but that the timeline may be shorter—and the scope of risk wider—than previously assumed.