Google's new whitepaper says it could take only minutes for a quantum system to crack Bitcoin.

A method reduces the number of qubits needed for quantum computers, making practical machines possible sooner and affecting computing.

Public-key cryptography can become unreliable in certain post-Q-Day scenarios. The earliest onchain stress is likely to concentrate in digital signatures (authorization and ownership) because they prove control. What fails first depends heavily on public ...

With around 26,000 qubits, the encryption could be broken in a day, the researchers report in a paper submitted March 30 to arXiv.org. Another prevalent form of encryption, RSA–2048, would require 100,000 qubits and 10 days to break, according to the researchers, from Caltech and quantum computing company Oratomic in Pasadena, Calif.

Quantum computers of the future may be closer to reality thanks to new research from Caltech and Oratomic, a Caltech-linked start-up company. Theorists and experimentalists teamed up to develop a new approach for reducing the errors that riddle today's rudimentary quantum computers.