It sounds out of a sci-fi video game, but new research suggest quantum attackers could break Bitcoin’s blockchain and steal coins mid-transaction sooner than it was originally expected.

Is Doomsday Near For Bitcoin?

A new whitepaper and blogpost published on Tuesday by Google’s Quantum AI team claims that Bitcoin and Ethereum’s cryptography can be broken with fewer than 500,000 physical qubits and roughly 1,200 “logical” qubits, far below the “millions” that used to be cited.

Most blockchains and cryptocurrencies protect wallets and transactions using 256‑bit elliptic curve cryptography (a very strong mathematical lock) based on the discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP‑256). The research points at a significant decreased in…