Google's quantum AI team states that the latest white paper finds that breaking the cryptographic technologies used by Bitcoin and Ethereum may require fewer than 500,000 physical qubits, lower than the millions often mentioned in recent years. According to NS3, Google researchers claim that a well-prepared attacker could complete the final step in about nine minutes after a Bitcoin public key appears in a real-time transaction, with a confirmation time of about ten minutes. Google researchers also note that Taproot may increase risks because it by default makes public keys visible, with the paper estimating that about 6.9 million Bitcoins exist in wallets where public keys are exposed.