Google Announces 'Quantum Superchip' Willow - Is Bitcoin Threatened?

Google's new quantum superchip Willow has processing power beyond the reach of the world's fastest supercomputers.

Willow Solves Problems Older Than the Age of the Universe in Minutes

Google has just announced a major breakthrough in the field of quantum computing with the development of a new chip called Willow.

According to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Willow has the ability to calculate up to 105 qubits, allowing the chip to perform tasks that the world's leading supercomputers would take 10 million trillion years (10 septillion) to complete in just a few minutes. However, the chip is prone to errors because it is sensitive to small factors such as subatomic particles from space.

One of the biggest challenges of quantum computers is that as the number of qubits increases, errors also increase, preventing the chip from outperforming classical computers. Since the 1990s, scientists have been working on quantum error correction technology to overcome this problem. Google said in a new study published in the journal Nature that it has found a way to link qubits on the Willow chip to reduce the error rate as the number of qubits increases. Moreover, the company can correct errors in real time, a step closer to the promising era of quantum computing.

Back in 2019, Google claimed that its quantum chip could solve a problem in 5 minutes that would take a classical computer 10,000 years. However, this claim was disputed by IBM, which said that the problem could be solved in just 2.5 days using different technical assumptions. In its latest announcement, Google has considered the feedback and asserted that, even under the most ideal conditions, a classical computer would still need a billion years to achieve the same result as the Willow chip.

According to Anthony Megrant, chief architect of Google Quantum AI, qubit quality is the key to overcoming the current limitations of the technology.

To speed up the development process, Google has built its own chip manufacturing facility, replacing the facility at the University of California. With this new facility, they can quickly test ideas and produce new chips in a shorter time. These chips are cooled in ultra-cryostats to perform complex experiments. Megrant said that Google's goal is to create rapid learning cycles, effectively moving the technology from idea to practice.

With this step, Google has crossed the "equilibrium" point between quantum computers and classical computers, paving the way for future practical applications such as medicine, battery chemistry and artificial intelligence. This is an important milestone not only for Google but also for the entire quantum industry.

Is Willow the "new threat" to Bitcoin?

Google's launch of the Willow quantum chip has many people worried: Will this technology break Bitcoin's security system, or even help Google mine the remaining Bitcoins on the network?

Currently, Bitcoin operates on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) mechanism, requiring computers to solve complex cryptographic problems to confirm transactions and create new blocks. With superior speed, quantum supercomputers can significantly shorten the time to solve PoW problems, bringing advantages to the mining process.

However, the reality is not that simple, according to Bitcoin cryptography researcher Ben Sigman.

First, attacking or controlling the Bitcoin network requires a quantum computer with millions of stable and reliable qubits - a goal that even Google admits will take years to develop. Specifically, Bitcoin relies on two types of encryption:

ECDSA 256: Vulnerable to the “Shor algorithm”, but to break it, it requires more than 1,000,000 qubits, while Willow only has 105 qubits.

SHA-256: This encryption is much harder to beat, requiring a different method (Grover’s algorithm) and millions of physical qubits to pose a real threat.

Second, the Bitcoin network has built-in difficulty adjustment mechanisms to ensure that block generation times remain around 10 minutes. If a single entity, like Google, dominates mining, the network will automatically increase the difficulty, reducing the effectiveness of any single computing power.

Third, the Bitcoin system and many other modern blockchains like Avalanche have been designed to minimize the risk of being attacked by quantum computers. In transactions, the public key is not directly public but must be double-hashed. This makes the coins "at rest" highly quantum resistant, since the attacker does not have enough information to exploit it.

However, because of this, Avalanche founder Emin Gun Sirer believes that the Bitcoin network has a weakness when the addresses containing founder Satoshi Nakamoto's 1 million BTC are using an old format, exposing the public key and thereby creating conditions for quantum computers to "guess" the password. Sirer believes that there will come a time when the Bitcoin community needs to consider permanently freezing Satoshi Nakamoto's BTC to avoid affecting the network, but this also means damaging the core decentralized nature of blockchain technology.

Fourth, blockchain developers are also actively researching and deploying "quantum-resistant" algorithms to protect the network from potential threats.

Therefore, the prospect of Google breaking the security system or mining all the remaining Bitcoin is very unlikely at the present time. However, the development of quantum technology is a wake-up call for the blockchain industry to continuously improve security and anticipate future challenges.

A Bitcoin community member also shared Satoshi's post on the BitcoinTalk forum in June 2010 when asked about how the network would respond in the event of a SHA-256 encryption failure:

"If SHA-256 is completely defeated, I think we should agree on the initial state of the blockchain before the problem occurred, fix it, and continue to operate with the new hash function.

If the hash function continues to be attacked, we can gradually switch to the new hash in an orderly manner. The software can be programmed to switch to a new hash after a certain number of blocks. All users must upgrade at that time. The software must also save the new hash of all old blocks to avoid new blocks having the same hash as the old block..."