Bitcoin

Google's quantum team has discovered that breaking RSA encryption — commonly used in banking systems and some crypto wallets—may require significantly fewer qubits than previously believed. Researcher Craig Gidney stated that a 2048-bit RSA key could potentially be cracked in under a week using fewer than 1 million noisy qubits, compared to the 20 million estimated back in 2019. Although Bitcoin relies on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) rather than RSA, this advancement suggests that the timeline for breaking ECC-based security could also be shortened, raising broader concerns about future quantum threats to blockchain security.