Source: Daoshuo Blockchain

On December 10, Google officially announced a major technological news:

Its latest quantum computer "Willow" has achieved Two important achievements:

-Willow was able to exponentially reduce errors while using more qubits (with 105 physical qubits), cracking a problem he had been working on for nearly 30 years. Quantum error correction challenge.

- Willow can complete a standard benchmark calculation in less than 5 minutes, which would take today’s fastest supercomputers 10^25 (10000000000000000000000000) years. The age of the universe is still long.

This is a major advance made by Google in quantum computing.

However, Google also admitted in the news: Quantum computers that can be actually used in commercial scenarios may not appear before 2030.

Quantum computing is also one of the most cutting-edge research fields in information technology.

In our encryption ecosystem, many readers have heard more or less about quantum computing because it poses a major threat to the encryption algorithm, the cornerstone of blockchain technology. More generally, quantum computers are theoretically capable of breaking the encryption algorithms used by blockchain technology.

Seeing Google’s achievements in quantum computing, many people, including many traditional self-media on the Internet, began to declare:

Bitcoin is about to be doomed.

There are two articles on the Internet that answer this question very well. Of course, some of the data is questionable in my opinion, but taken together, some of the core points of these two articles still hit the mark.

The links to the two articles are attached at the end of the article. Below I excerpt two paragraphs of the core points of these two articles.

1. From the perspective of computing power and commercial application, current quantum computers are still far away from threatening crypto assets

Willow quantum computer currently has 105 qubits. But Kevin Rose, a former senior product manager at Google, pointed out that “breaking Bitcoin’s encryption is estimated to require a quantum computer with approximately 13 million qubits to complete the decryption within 24 hours.”

So in terms of computing power alone, the number of qubits required to crack Bitcoin’s encryption algorithm is more than 100,000 times that of Willow.

In addition, even if the computing power is achieved, Google itself estimates that it is unlikely to realize commercial use of quantum computers before 2030.

This breaks the saying that "Bitcoin is going to be finished" from the two perspectives of computing power and commercial use.

2. The application of encrypted assets has already protected against quantum attacks

Let’s take Bitcoin as an example.

If we only use a receiving address once, the risk of being attacked will be greatly reduced. Many Bitcoin wallets have now adopted this method: only use a receiving address once.

In addition, if we use a Segregated Witness address to receive Bitcoin, we can also reduce the risk of quantum attacks.

Finally, Bitcoin’s encryption algorithm itself has been evolving, and new quantum-resistant algorithms can be introduced in the future.

The Ethereum ecosystem has also been prepared for this for a long time. Vitalik has proposed a hard fork to Ethereum to introduce an algorithm that resists quantum attacks.

So in the encryption ecosystem itself, many projects have already taken precautions against quantum attacks.

Therefore, those of us who are deeply involved in the encryption ecosystem do not need to worry too much if we can look at this issue objectively.

This topic will be discussed hotly every once in a while. Every hot discussion is a science popularization, and every science popularization will let more and more people understand the real situation.

So we should focus more on the progress of the encryption ecology and not be disturbed by too many unknown noises from the outside world.