"This achievement firmly established our country’s leading position in international quantum computing research," a team of researchers in China said in a statement alongside a paper published in the journal Science on Thursday, outlining how their Jiuzhang prototype quantum computer took just over three minutes to complete a task the world’s fastest traditional computer would take more than 600 million years solve—almost 100tn times faster than today's supercomputers.
"Quantum computers are posing a serious challenge to the security of the bitcoin blockchain," wrote blockchain and cryptography researchers at the consultancy Deloitte. "Quantum computers might eventually become so fast that they will undermine the bitcoin transaction process. In this case the security of the bitcoin blockchain will be fundamentally broken."
Despite the developments achieved by China and Google, this doomsday scenario is still some distance away, with Deloitte's team suggesting the risk of quantum computers to bitcoin could be offset by a "transition to a new type of cryptography called ‘post-quantum cryptography’, which is considered to be inherently resistant to quantum attacks."Article:
Forget Google—Could China Be About To Destroy Bitcoin?According to the article, China's quantum computing is the biggest threat to Bitcoin as well as the entire crypto world. Until now, we still believe in the almost absolute security of blockchain because in order to hack blockchain, a hacker needs a computer system with at least the power of the whole blockchain and this is impractical with current technology. However, quantum superiority will completely change our conception.
Of course, the Chinese government will not only use quantum computers to mine and take all the block rewards of Bitcoin, but they can attack and manipulate the entire Bitcoin blockchain by that machine. The same can be said for other blockchains, regardless of POW or POS. So the crypto/blockchain revolution will completely fail.
Our hope at this point is: maybe that supercomputer is just a rumor and can't really put it into use, or the entire crypto community needs some effective technology to avoid the attack from future quantum computers. Compromising with governments is not what I suggest.
There used to be a few crypto projects related to this problem, but now I no longer hear about their development or product to contribute to a blockchain 3.0 capable of fighting quantum supremacy. The leader of the Altcoins world - Ethereum, is still at phase 0 of ETH2.0. And it doesn't seem like we are ready for this era.
Do you believe that quantum superiority really exists? And what can we do to protect blockchains and the crypto world?