Google claimed that it achieved its long-proposed goal of “quantum supremacy”. This seems to be what a research paper published by the Financial Times has claimed. This is a major milestone in quantum computing and signals a new era in which quantum computers can start out-performing classical supercomputers for various applications. Google’s quantum computer achieving quantum supremacy means that the computational capabilities of these machines far outmatch that of classical supercomputers. It’s the first time a quantum computer has been able to achieve this feat. This means the encryption we all depend on our privacy on the internet and more importantly the same encryption we use to secure crypto networks might become susceptible to cracking.
How worried should we be
While at first sight, it might not sound that threatening, this might be the biggest threat ever faced by cryptocurrencies. Yes, biggest, more than the government, more than hackers and more than financing terror or money laundering. How come? We have to remember that even though crypto has always been attacked by a hacker, technically no hacker or hacking groups have been able to hack into the core network of a cryptocurrency. This is due to two reasons, the combined computing power of the network and strong cryptography. With powerful quantum computers, both of these obstacles can be overcome. The principle behind elliptical curve cryptography is that the amount of computing power needed to break it cannot be achieved in a reasonable time frame. Unfortunately, the expected output of a quantum computer can easily break them. Also, with a few powerful quantum computers, an entity with the right resource can mount an eclipse attack on most crypto networks and succeed in doing so.
Steps to mitigate
Let’s look at some of the possible solutions to the problem.
While it might seem like the end of the world, we are still not at that point in time. Quantum computers are expensive and take up a lot of resources, breaking down a cryptocurrency is not going to the first agenda of these developers. Secondly, the testing done to find out the capability of quantum computers is a synthetic test to generate random numbers. How it will perform in a real-world situation is not yet known. There are a number of paths forward for the crypto community, and as always, let us all hope crypto will come through this challenge too.
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