Matthew Sparkes is a writer.
quantum computers could one day threaten the existence of the digital currency, but not yet.
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It would take about a million times the size of today's computers to break the algorithm that secures bitcoin, which would put the currency at risk from hackers.
The US National Security Agency created a computer program called SHA-256 that is used to keep the network secure. Ordinary computers can't break this code, but quantum computers, which can exploit the properties of quantum physics to speed up some calculations, could theoretically do so.
Mark and his colleagues have looked at how large a quantum computer would need to be in order to break the digital currency.
Every transaction must be confirmed by the network of miners before it is added to the ledger. You can take ownership of the bitcoins if you crack the key during the confirmation process.
The transactions get announced and there is a key associated with that.
It would take a quantum computer with 1.9 billion qubits and a machine with 317 million qubits to break the cipher in 10 minutes. This figure only drops to 13 million qubits if you allow for a whole day.
IBM's record-breaking superconducting quantum computer has only 127 qubits, so devices would need to become a million times larger to threaten the currency.
There are concerns about other data with a much wider window of vulnerability because of the fact that bitcoin is secure for the foreseeable future. A quantum computer can be used to harvest, store and decode an email in the future, which some security experts believe is already happening.
People are worried because they can save the messages and not have to worry about them in the future.
There is a journal reference to AVS Quantum Science.
There are more on these topics.
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