Many cryptocurrency analysts of bitcoin he said that the fact that it has not been cyber-attacked until now played an important role in seeing BTC as a store of value.
So, can this situation change? According to The Independent, Mark Webber, a quantum physicist at the University of Sussex, Bitcoin He claimed that it is possible to break the algorithm that protects it with quantum computers.
Stating that Bitcoin is still safe for now because the Bitcoin algorithm cannot be broken by ordinary computers, Mark Webber and his friends investigated how big a quantum computer is needed to break the Bitcoin algorithm.
Webber and colleagues calculated that cracking Bitcoin’s encryption in 10 minutes would require a 1.9 billion qubit quantum computer, while cracking it in an hour would require a 317 million qubit computer.
This is great news for Bitcoin investors. Because even the record-breaking superconducting quantum computer introduced by the US technology giant IBM in November has only a 127 qubit quantum chip.
For this reason, Webber said that devices that already exist in the market must be a million times larger in order to become a threat to Bitcoin.
Quantum computers could be a threat to Bitcoin!
Stating that it is possible for a quantum computer to have a 300 million qubit chip in the future, Webber and his colleagues also underlined that this would pose a threat to Bitcoin:
“Our estimate of 30 million to 300 million qubits required to crack the Bitcoin password shows that for now, Bitcoin can be considered safe from a quantum attack.
However, it seems possible that devices of this size can be produced in the future, and with future technological developments, the estimates of 30 to 300 million qubits can be lowered even further.”
Estimating that a quantum computer would need at least 13 million qubit chips to break Bitcoin’s encryption in one day, Mark Webber stated that this is unlikely anytime soon.