Satoshi-era bitcoin faces a bigger quantum threat after Google’s new Willow breakthrough
Google reports that its Willow quantum chip’s cultivation method reduced errors in preparing quantum “magic states” by about 40-fold, achieving 99.99% fidelity among states that passed checks, though only about 8% of attempts succeeded. Magic states are a resource quantum computers need for calculations, so producing them efficiently could reduce hardware overhead in a future attack on Bitcoin and Ethereum keys. The experiment is an engineering advance, not a new 40-fold reduction in the estimated cost of cracking wallets: Google’s earlier estimate already assumed efficient state production. The method still needs scaling and integration into longer, error-corrected calculations. A sufficiently capable quantum computer could theoretically use Shor’s algorithm to recover exposed private keys, but no such attack has been demonstrated.
