Google veteran Graham Cooke has opined that Bitcoin is not currently threatened by quantum computing.
“Your wallet’s math is stronger than the fabric of spacetime itself,” he said in a recent social media post.
Google’s Majorana 1 breakthrough
As reported by U.Today, there was some panic within the cryptocurrency community following the unveiling of Microsoft’s Majorana 1 quantum chip that could potentially scale to a million qubits.
It was developed with the help of a novel material called “a “topoconductor” that was engineered by Microsoft.
The technology could finally make quantum computing capable of performing real-world applications, and some Bitcoiners were concerned that such a powerful computer could potentially crack Bitcoin’s addresses.
“Regular qubits lose their quantum state from the slightest disturbance. Microsoft’s are like knots in rubber bands – stretch and twist, but the knot remains…This stability means quantum computers could scale to millions of qubits,” Cooke said.
There were also some other recent quantum-related developments, such as the announcements of Google’s Willow and IBM’s Blue Jay, that prompted discussions about the long-term viability of Bitcoin’s cryptographic security.
Don’t underestimate math
Cooke, who is currently the chief executive officer at blockchain startup Brava Labs, claims that those who doubt the robustness of Bitcoin’s security “massively underestimate” the miracle of mathematics guarding digital assets.
Even though quantum computing is advancing at a faster-than-expected rate, the math securing one’s crypto wallet is more powerful than most people realize.
Cooke has noted that a single Bitcoin seed phrase contains more keys than there are stars in all the galaxies. A 24-word seed phrase would require 340 septillion trillion more combinations than a 12-word phrase.
“The universe has existed for only 14 billion years. You’d need to restart the universe a trillion trillion times to get close,” Cooke commented.
