The buzz around Bitcoin has heated up again due to the experiment with quantum computing.

Researcher Giancarlo Lelli actually managed to recover a 15-bit key based on elliptic curve cryptography using a public quantum computer. For this, he received a reward as part of the Project Eleven initiative and the 'QDay Prize' competition, with a prize of 1 BTC.

The experiment is based on Shor's algorithm — theoretically, it can break the cryptography on elliptic curves used by Bitcoin and most blockchains.

But there's an important detail that can easily get lost in the hype:

15 bits is a proof of concept, not a real threat.

Bitcoin uses 256-bit keys. The difference between these levels is not just significant; it's astronomical. This isn't 'a bit harder', it's a whole different scale of computational physics.

Today's quantum machines are far from the required power. Estimates for a real ECDSA breach range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of stable qubits, plus massive requirements for error tolerance.

That's why it currently looks more like a 'Bitcoin hack' but rather an early engineering experiment that shows direction, not the final outcome.

#crypto #quantum #bitcoin #security

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