Can Google’s quantum supercomputer mine the remaining 3 million Bitcoins in just 2 seconds?

There are about 3 million Bitcoin (BTC) currently untapped, with a total value of $ 26.3 billion (at current prices 1BTC = $ 8.7 thousand). The process of fully mining these BTC is expected to take about 121 years. However, a theory has been put forward, after Google achieved Quantum Advantage with the quantum supercomputer Sycamore.

It was a time of 121 years to mine all of the remaining 3 million BTC, which could be shortened to less than 2 seconds. Google’s Sycamore quantum computer can solve the difficult math problem in as little as 200 seconds, a problem so difficult that IBM Summit Supercomputer takes 10,000 years to solve.

So can the hypothesis happen? And can Bitcoin’s encrypted blockchain network be decoded by a quantum supercomputer?

A machine that can solve every problem

Google says its 54-qubit Sycamore quantum processor takes only 200 seconds to accomplish the summation that Summit – the most powerful supercomputer on Earth – takes 10,000 years to solve. If the world’s most powerful supercomputer takes so long, it usually doesn’t have a door, which means that Sycamore has achieved quantum advantage.

Immediately after this information was published, the crypto community around the world was panicked and scared. Because one theory is that these quantum computers could threaten the blockchain network, which is highly encrypted. However, quantum supercomputers can decode them in the blink of an eye.

Quantum Supercomputer Sycamore 54 qubit from Google.

However, that might be true in theory, because Bitcoin’s blockchain network is so much more complicated. We will have to consider the mining difficulty factor of the blockchain network, with the principle of “difficulty adjustment”.

The Bitcoin network is designed to adjust its mining difficulty after every 2,016 blocks (about 14 days) based on the mining power involved in each cycle. This is to ensure that the block production time at the next stage is maintained for about 10 minutes. When fewer computers compete in bitcoin’s hash function to obtain newly created bitcoins, the difficulty decreases; When more players jump in, it increases.

The hypothesis ignores this, and if a quantum supercomputer is involved in decoding, then the next difficulty level will be increased to the point where even a quantum supercomputer will be slowed down. To ensure hardcoded coding it takes 10 minutes to add new Bitcoin blocks to the immutable Blockchain system.

Of course, no one has checked whether such a level of difficulty is possible or not.

Quantum supercomputer is not a threat to Bitcoin, but it is much more dangerous than that

Recently, Vitalik Buterin – the father of Ethereum – also asserted that Google’s quantum supercomputer is not really a threat to Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies. He said this machine is a proof of concept of a machine that has superior processing power, and that it is used for a bad scenario and threatens Bitcoin is far from possible. out.

However, if a quantum supercomputer touches Bitcoin’s blockchain network, it could paralyze the entire system because of the difficulty being pushed to a level that conventional machines cannot solve. That is theoretically, and Google certainly will not use its machine to do that.

However, there is another problem and it seems much more dangerous, according to crypto expert Andreas Antonopolous: “The problem is not really Bitcoin. If we have a machine that can solve every problem, the bigger problem is the entire communication system, top secret lines, financial system and so on. It all depends on the encryption. “We will need to upgrade these encryption systems so they can fight against quantum computers.”