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Google Just Proved It Can Break Bitcoin
Ship X/ TechX6 min read·Just now--
Before we start, if you are here just for the paper link, just scroll down to the bottom; we have attached it.
For the better part of a decade, the crypto world has treated quantum computing like a boogeyman, a terrifying concept, but ultimately something that’s always “30 years away.” Crypto purists have comfortably slept at night believing that by the time a machine could mathematically crack Bitcoin’s underlying encryption, we’d all be living on Mars anyway.
It turns out, the boogeyman is real, and it’s learning how to sprint.
In a newly published, sobering whitepaper, researchers at Google Quantum AI have dragged the timeline for a cryptographic doomsday out of the distant future and into the present. Their finding? A specialized quantum computer could hijack a Bitcoin transaction in as little as 9 minutes.
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Here is why the world’s most secure decentralized network is suddenly staring down the barrel of a multi-billion-dollar heist, and why the “quantum threat” is no longer just an academic thought experiment.
The Mempool Snatch
To grasp the severity of Google’s claim, we have to look at the vulnerable window of a standard…
