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New research by Google suggested that RSA encryption, a critical security feature used in securing Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC), may be more susceptible to quantum computing attacks than previously anticipated.

What Happened:  Google Quantum AI researcher Craig Gidney published a new paper indicating that RSA encryption could be broken with 20 times fewer quantum resources than previously estimated.

“We published a preprint demonstrating that 2048-bit RSA encryption could theoretically be broken by a quantum computer with 1 million noisy qubits running for one week. This is a 20-fold decrease in the number of qubits from our previous estimate,” Gidney wrote in a blog post.

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A qubit is the basic unit of information used to encode data in quantum computing, serving as the foundation upon which quantum algorithms are built.

The study did not specifically mention Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. However, the Elliptic Curve Cryptography algorithm, which secures transactions on Bitcoin with public and private keys, is similar in principle to the RSA.

While Elliptic Curve Cryptography is currently secure against classical computers, a strong enough quantum computer could effectively crack it in the years to come, according to a previous study.

Why It Matters: Concerns over Bitcoin’s cryptography have increased with the release of Google’s next-generation quantum chip, “Willow,” last year. This chip can solve a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes, a task that would take the world’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillions, or 10^25, years to solve.

While some experts ruled out immediate dangers, others advocated for proactive measures to prepare for the threat, such as switching to quantum-resistant algorithms.

A study led by the University of Kent’s School of Computing suggested that Bitcoin might need to undergo a costly and time-consuming update process to counter the threat from quantum computing in the future.

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