- Microsoft says it has made a new quantum computing breakthrough.
- The crypto industry doesn’t need to worry, an expert says.
- The development doesn’t speed up the timeline for when quantum computers will start to threaten crypto.
Microsoft says its new chip is a quantum computing breakthrough that can solve scaling issues that have persistently plagued the field.
But some in crypto are worried the development will accelerate the inevitable: that quantum computers will someday be able to break the encryption that underpins much of the $3.3 trillion industry.
Don’t fret just yet, says Pierre-Luc Dallaire-Demers, a scientist-in-residence at the University of Calgary.
“I don’t think it changes the timelines for Bitcoin, it’s still 2029 to 2031,” he told DL News, referring to the consensus that quantum computers will threaten older Bitcoin wallets — the most vulnerable cryptography in use — in around five years.
Majorana 1
Microsoft’s new chip, Majorana 1, is named after the Majorana fermion, a type of matter that the chip exploits to produce so-called qubits, units of information that power quantum computers.
What makes Majorana fermions special is that they don’t encounter errors as much as existing quantum computing methods using superconductors, making them theoretically much easier to scale.
“Over a long time, Majoranas may overtake superconducting qubits, but probably not before 10 years or so,” Dallaire-Demers said. “The results in the experimental paper suggest that they still have some engineering to do.”
Superfast computers that exploit quantum mechanical phenomena have long posed a theoretical threat to cryptography.
Most crypto projects have plans in place to make themselves quantum proof. Still, a sudden breakthrough could still catch developers off guard.
$107 billion problem
Not all blockchain cryptography is created equal.
Pay-To-Public-Key, or P2PK, Bitcoin wallets that tie funds directly to a user’s public key and require a private key “password” to spend, will be the first to fall to quantum computers.
Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, holds more than 1.1 million coins — valued at about $107 billion — in these older P2PK wallets.
For most users, avoiding the quantum computer threat is as simple as transferring coins to a newer wallet that doesn’t use P2PK — a fairly simple task.
But Nakamoto hasn’t touched his wallets since 2010. It’s not known if the Bitcoin creator has chosen not to access the wallets, or, as some believe, has taken the Bitcoin fortune to his grave.
“As QC gets threatening, the Bitcoin community might want to look into freezing Satoshi’s coins,” Emin Gün Sirer, founder of the Avalanche blockchain, said in an X post.
Breaking into Nakamoto’s wallets is by far one of the easiest applications for the large quantum computers of the future, Dallaire-Demers said.
Further in the future, quantum computers will likely get powerful enough to tackle more advanced cryptography, such as Rivest-Shamir-Adleman encryption, or RSA.
RSA is used in some blockchains like Hedera Hashgraph and Arweave. But it’s more widely used to secure data transmission on the internet, such as in emails.
While Microsoft’s Majorana 1 chip likely won’t develop fast enough to compete in the race to crack Nakamoto’s wallets, it “may become a serious contender for breaking RSA in 2035,” Dallaire-Demers said.
Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.
