Quantum Computers and Bitcoin: Future Risks and Solutions

### The Impact of Quantum Computers on Bitcoin: Opportunities and Risks
* 🧬 Quantum computers promise a future where **diseases are curable**, **energy breakthroughs are achieved**, and **materials revolutionize transportation**, all by **simulating nature and solving complex problems faster than current supercomputers**.
* 💻 Google's new quantum chip, Willow, showcases significant advancements, solving problems in **under 5 minutes** that would take supercomputers **10 to the 25 years**, indicating its potential to **revolutionize computing**.
* 🔒 However, this advancement raises concerns about the **security of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin**, which relies on two types of encryption: **ECDSA 256 and SHA-256**, both designed to be **resistant to current technological threats**.
* 🔑 While quantum computers could theoretically crack Bitcoin's encryption using Shor's algorithm, estimates suggest that **over 1 million qubits** would be required to break ECDSA 256, while Willow only has **105 qubits**.
* 🌌 SHA-256, Bitcoin's backbone, remains incredibly secure; cracking it would require **searching through 2 to the 128 possible outcomes**, a feat **far beyond current capabilities**.
* ⚠ Despite the advancements in quantum computing, experts predict that the technology needed to **break Bitcoin's encryption is still years away**, and the community is already exploring **quantum-resistant cryptography**.
* 🔄 Bitcoin has the potential to adapt through upgrades, like hard forks, allowing it to **implement new cryptographic models that can withstand quantum attacks**, ensuring its **long-term viability**.
* 🔍 The ongoing dialogue about the implications of quantum computing extends beyond Bitcoin, raising questions about **privacy, data security, and the future of technology** in our lives.

Quantum computers pose a threat to Bitcoin's security, but Bitcoin's adaptability and community could mitigate this risk.

So let's talk about Bitcoin and quantum computers. Imagine a world where diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer are curable; a world where living past 100 happens all the time; a world where energy breakthroughs like fusion and problems like climate change are solved; where we

create materials stronger than anything we've seen that will revolutionize transportation and space exploration. That is the promise of quantum computers—machines so powerful they can simulate nature itself and solve problems that would take today's fastest supercomputers longer

than the age of the universe to solve. Now, with this promise though comes a huge risk. Quantum computers are not just going to rewrite the rules of computing; they're also going to rewrite all the rules of security, and that raises a lot of questions about things like what that

means for people's investments. And one of the questions that I had is, what's going to happen to all the Bitcoin now that quantum computers are so much closer to reality? Specifically, I'm talking about Google's new quantum chip called Willow, which was just announced. But first, let's go back to the

basics: What are quantum computers? So the computers that we have right now use what are called bits to represent a state of information in binary, which is either a one or a zero. But quantum computers use something called qubits, and qubits can exist in a state of

what's called superposition, meaning they can both be a one and a zero at the same time. And this property allows quantum computers to perform a huge amount of calculations at the same time, giving them exponential power for certain types of problems. Think of it

Like this, a normal computer will try to solve a maze by trying one path at a time. A quantum computer will try every possible path at the exact same time to find the correct solution almost instantly. And it's not just faster; it's a completely different way of thinking

about computation. That brings me to Google's latest breakthrough: the Willow quantum chip. Willow is now the most advanced quantum processor Google has ever built, with major improvements over older chips like Foxtail, Bristlecone, and Sycamore. Now, when Google announced

this latest chip, Willow, they started off by saying Willow just did something that was almost impossible—arriving before Grand Theft Auto 6. No, that's not what they said. They said Willow solved a problem in under 5 minutes that would take the world's fastest supercomputers

10 to the 25 years to solve. That's a one with 25 zeros after it. Now, to put that in perspective, that is longer than the age of the universe. So, if this chip is as powerful as they say it is, the question is, what does that mean for the

safety of our investments, and what's going to happen to all the Bitcoin? I want to help explain what this new Willow chip means for quantum computers, if this actually poses any real threats, and then I want to show you how I'm investing given this new

information. So let's get into it. Hi, my name is Andre J. Hope you're doing well. Come for the finance and stay for one of the biggest updates to computers in our lifetime: quantum technology. Now, first I want to say that this video is going to be one of the nerdiest videos I've ever

Making a blend of economics, finance, technology, and physics all into one. It's going to be a super technical video, and it'll probably put you to sleep. I'm sorry. For decades, we've talked about quantum computers. I remember hearing about them when I was in early grade school, and

they've always been 10 to 15 years away since the '90s. But what I learned is that there are two major reasons why quantum computers have been held back. And the first reason is something called quantum coherence, or how long qubits can hold their quantum

state before they collapse. Now, they need to be in a quantum state just long enough to solve a problem. And the longer it can be in that state, the more complex a problem it can solve. Now, the second challenge is something called the critical error threshold, and that means

the point at which error rates are low enough for us to trust the results of a computation. That means we need something called quantum error correction, because without quantum error correction, errors are created faster than they can be fixed, which makes it impossible for us to trust the results of a computation.

Now, how, though, does the system know that something is an error? And how does it even correct itself? Right? Like, how would a computer even know that? And that gets insanely complicated, but it uses something called syndrome qubits to look for errors in what are called logical

qubits. So imagine you have three friends—right, I know it's a stretch—and each one writes down the same secret message. Now, if one of them makes a mistake, you can tell which one made the mistake because the other two copies match, but the third one doesn't. So you correct the message.

By replacing the incorrect friend with the correct one; that's a super simplified explanation. In quantum computing, instead of checking friends, it's checking quantum relationships, and if something looks off, it knows which qubit to correct. Long story short, these two problems—quantum

coherence (AKA how long it's in a quantum state) and quantum error correction—have been the two reasons why this technology hasn't progressed as fast as we liked. Until Willow. Willow's made quantum coherence longer because Willow has increased this coherence time from 20

microseconds to 100 microseconds—a fivefold improvement. This means the qubits can perform more complex calculations with fewer errors before they lose their quantum state. And they also introduced a much more effective way to solve quantum errors with new hardware features like

tunable qubits, which allows engineers to fix the error in real time using AI with things like machine learning and neural networks. Overall, Willow is a huge step forward in quantum computers and brings us closer to bigger-scale quantum computer systems. That's what quantum

computing is; that is what their problems are; this is how we're fixing them. But what is it actually capable of? Right? Does it have the power to break Bitcoin and cryptography? Now, spoiler alert: Bitcoin security is a lot stronger than most people give it credit for, but

there's also more to it than most people have heard about because Bitcoin has two separate types of encryption: the first is something called ECDSA 256, and the second one is SHA-256. Now, these cryptographic algorithms are designed to be almost impossible to break with

Today's technology, but quantum computers operate on a completely different level. So let me break it down: ECDSA 256, which is short for Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm, is used to create your private and public keys. Now, the public key is what you give out

to people to receive Bitcoin. It's completely sharable, but if someone gets access to your private key, they could steal your Bitcoin. But there's also a catch: with a powerful enough quantum computer and a public key that was exposed, it would make it possible to

break into your wallet because quantum computers can theoretically use something called Shor's algorithm to break the elliptic curve signature encryption by factoring large numbers. Meaning, quantum computers that are smart enough could derive your private key from your public key. But the good news

is some estimates say that in order to do that, breaking ECDSA 256 would require over 1 million qubits. Now, Google's Willow chip, as advanced as it is, only has 105 qubits. And remember, there's also a second part to what makes

Bitcoin safe, which is SHA-256, which is the backbone of Bitcoin's blockchain. Now, SHA-256 is a cryptographic hash function that takes any input and produces a fixed-size 256-bit output. This output is like a digital fingerprint, and it's almost impossible to reverse engineer. Now, SHA

256 is also what's called collision-resistant, meaning the chances of two different inputs producing the same hash are really, really low. Meaning the odds of you creating a wallet with the same private key as someone else is very, very, very low. Now, to crack SHA-256, a quantum

A computer would need to use something called Grover's algorithm, which theoretically speeds up the process by reducing the number of operations required to find a hash. But even with this quantum speedup, you'd still need to search through two to the 128 possible outcomes, which is a number

so big it's almost impossible to explain. But to put that into perspective, imagine that I was thinking of a single playing card in a deck, and your job was to guess what I was thinking of. Except instead of a playing card, I'm thinking of a grain of sand, and you'd

be picking a single grain of sand, not just from one beach, but from every grain of sand on all the beaches of the entire world. What would be the odds of you picking the one I'm thinking of? Technically it's possible, but realistically, there's not a chance it

would ever happen. But even that is more likely to happen than cracking SHA-256. That is how powerful Bitcoin's encryption really is. Some estimates say that it would take millions of error-corrected qubits to achieve this, which is far beyond what any quantum computer is capable of doing right now.

So yes, quantum computers are getting better, but they're still nowhere near the scale they need to be to crack Bitcoin's private key encryption. But there is a catch, and the catch is that some people disagree on

how many qubits are actually needed. And this is where it gets way beyond my pay grade, and my brain is just not big enough to understand this, but I'm going to describe the problem anyway. Some people say that we actually need as little as 22,000 logical qubits to break

Share to 56, and it's predicted that in the next 10 to 20 years, we will see more technological progress and, as a result, more wealth creation than we've seen in the last 100 years combined. Experts say this is going to result in some

incredibly transformative investing. In fact, you might have seen headlines about a crypto entrepreneur spending $6.2 million on an art piece of a banana. J.P. Morgan themselves are talking about how new norms are taking hold and how alternative investments will, quote, 'play a key role in portfolio construction' for

both institutions and individuals. In fact, BofA found that over 80% of young, wealthy Americans currently collect art for a slice of their portfolio or would like to. And while the banana is kind of a funny example of this, there are also seriously impressive ones, like someone

just spent $121 million on a single McGr piece, and it's not even his most famous painting. Whoever the buyer is, they're not alone, because just in the next two years, art and collectibles are expected to make up roughly 11% of the portfolios

of ultra-high-net-worth individuals. And even in a softer cycle, we've now seen multiple record-breaking art sales just since my last video talking about this. In fact, I also diversify a small part of my portfolio with art, just like Ken Griffin, Jeff Bezos, and Steve Cohen, who

spent a billion dollars on his collection. Except I didn't need to spend millions of dollars. See Masterworks. Today's sponsor is allowing everyday investors to get in on multi-million-dollar art investments like Banksy, Basquiat, and Picasso. I've been talking about

Masterworks is an art investment platform. I've invested alongside thousands of you. Masterworks isn't an exchange, it's not just an app; they're actively buying and selling iconic works of art around the world. And, like I said, I personally hold a stake in shares of a

Basquiat offering. Even better, Masterworks' most recent sale was another Basquiat, which sold for $8 million earlier this year after 1398 days. For every $10,000 someone invested in that piece, they took home over $2600 in profit, even after fees. So,

if you'd like to diversify, you can easily sign up for Masterworks by going to the QR code or by clicking the link in the description. And now let's get back to it. So the rate of advancement is actually getting faster and faster thanks to these AI language learning

models and quantum computers, which means maybe in the next 10 years we will be able to crack all these algorithms. And at that point, what's going to happen? And first, I just want to say the obvious: that when quantum computers reach a point where they can break Bitcoin's

encryption, Bitcoin would probably be the least of everybody's worries. Think about it: the same quantum computers that could crack Bitcoin would also break the encryption that protects banks and all those checking and savings accounts, healthcare systems, stock markets, military communications, and of course,

our personal data. These systems would be way more attractive targets for attackers because they hold much more valuable information. So if we ever do reach a level of 'Now You See Me' quantum capability, the entire world would be in trouble—not just Bitcoin, but

I do think that it's plausible to assume that Bitcoin could be the first attacked because if a company has a powerful enough quantum computer, it wouldn't want to attack a bank or a country—that's kind of illegal—but a cryptocurrency that nobody owns, just to prove a

technological point. It's plausible. I don't think we should ignore that the potential is there, and this is something that I've thought about since I got into Bitcoin because quantum computing is not an 'if' problem, it's a 'when' problem. It will happen, and when it does, Jim Cramer

will be selling out for the tenth time; Bitcoin's price will probably crash; it'll scare most people out of it; it was a scam, it was a bubble all along. Now, I don't know when this will happen and I don't know how bad it's going to get, but

I do know that even if it does happen, in the long term, Bitcoin will still be safe, and the people that understand why will keep their Bitcoin. Unfortunately, most people will probably sell because they don't watch nerdy YouTube videos like this, especially all the way to the end.

But Bitcoin will recover, and it's going to do that because of what I'm about to show you in this next part. Bitcoin is future-proofed, and it was designed to be that way all the way from the beginning by Satoshi, and he even predicted this

way back in 2010 when he talked about moving over to a new hash. The way that Bitcoin can do that, by the way, is through an upgrade by what's called a hard fork. So you can think of it like a snake that sort of sheds its skin and

becomes like new. Bitcoin is capable of doing that, and it has done that before; in fact, in 2017, Bitcoin split into two different forks: Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. Now, that's a separate video altogether. I can make that one; let me know down in the comments below, but

it was one of, if not the darkest time of Bitcoin's history. I was there! Gandalf 3,000 years ago... If you had your Bitcoin on the blockchain when this happened, the fork produced an equal amount of both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. So if you had

10 Bitcoin on the blockchain, for example, you would also get 10 Bitcoin Cash as well. Now, I actually have proof of this because I still have 21 Bitcoin Cash that I never sold; I still have it on my ledger. But when all this went down, it

was pretty crazy times. But what does all this mean, right? It means that the developers and the researchers right now are looking at quantum computer-resistant cryptography. These algorithms that they're looking into are designed to protect against quantum attacks. So instead of using something like SHA-256,

it'll be some other cryptographic model that quantum computers can't solve right now. Now, it's not going to be as simple as flipping a switch and upgrading the firmware for Bitcoin; it's going to take the entire community and the whole network to agree, including miners,

developers, nodes, users, investors, businesses, hardware wallets—everybody. But as users and investors of Bitcoin, all we have to do is nothing; just hold the coins on the blockchain and try to use a new address every time you transact without revealing your public address. If you want to learn how to do

That I have a course that's over 4 hours long that teaches you step-by-step, for beginners. You can use coupon code Andre40 to get 40% off. It teaches you how to protect your coins and so much more, but the point is that Bitcoin can be

future-proofed, and it can even be saved after a quantum computer attack. Hopefully, though, we're able to do this before quantum computers get good enough because, at the same time, quantum computers do raise a lot of questions about everything else, like privacy and security. And how do we protect our data

and how do we make sure it's used responsibly? Does this prove we live in a multiversal universe? Because some people seem to think that the math verifies that we are living in a multi-universal world. It's a lot of really interesting stuff, so maybe refer

to this video in 10 years when it happens! But let me know your comments down below. Do you think quantum computers will break Bitcoin, or will the crypto community stay one step ahead, as always? I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Smash the like button,

subscribe if you haven't already. I'd love to see you back here next week. I'll see you soon. Bye-bye.

Bitcoin Is F*ked (Google’s Willow Quantum Computer)

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I'm like Harry Potter - if he was a financial minimalist, did card tricks and worried about money. Biz inquiries: andrei@majikh.com


Andrei Jikh

Introduction to Quantum Computers and their Potential Impact

Discusses the potential of quantum computers to solve complex problems like curing diseases and addressing climate change.

Highlights the immense computational power of quantum computers compared to current supercomputers.

Explains that quantum computers pose a significant risk to current security systems.

Introduces Google's new quantum chip, Willow, and its potential implications for Bitcoin.

Explains the difference between bits and qubits and how superposition allows quantum computers to perform multiple calculations simultaneously.

Google's Willow Quantum Chip and its Capabilities

Describes Willow as the most advanced quantum processor Google has built, with significant improvements over previous chips.

Highlights Willow's ability to solve a problem in under 5 minutes that would take current supercomputers 10²⁵ years.

Raises the question of the implications of Willow's power for the security of investments, particularly Bitcoin.

States the video's aim to explain Willow's significance for quantum computing, potential threats, and the presenter's investment strategy.

Challenges in Quantum Computing and Willow's Advancements

Explains the challenges of quantum coherence and the critical error threshold in quantum computing.

Describes quantum error correction using syndrome qubits, using an analogy of friends writing a secret message.

Highlights Willow's improvements in quantum coherence time (from 20 to 100 microseconds).

Mentions Willow's more effective error correction using tunable qubits and AI.

Bitcoin's Security and Vulnerability to Quantum Computers

Explains that Bitcoin uses two types of encryption: ECDSA 256 and SHA-256.

Describes how ECDSA 256 is used for creating private and public keys and its theoretical vulnerability to Shor's algorithm.

Discusses SHA-256 and its collision resistance, explaining its strength against quantum attacks using Grover's algorithm.

Concludes that current quantum computers are not powerful enough to break Bitcoin's encryption.

Acknowledges differing opinions on the number of qubits needed to break Bitcoin's encryption.

Future of Investing and the Impact of Technological Advancements

Predicts significant technological progress and wealth creation in the next 10-20 years.

Mentions J.P. Morgan's view on alternative investments' role in portfolio construction.

Provides examples of high-value art investments, highlighting the growing trend in art collecting.

Mentions the presenter's own diversification into art investments.

Promotes Masterworks as an art investment platform.

Long-Term Implications and Bitcoin's Future

Discusses the accelerating rate of advancement in quantum computing and its potential impact on various encryption systems.

Highlights that banks, healthcare systems, and other critical infrastructure would be more attractive targets than Bitcoin.

Suggests that Bitcoin could be the first target for a quantum computer attack to prove technological capability.

Predicts a potential crash in Bitcoin's price upon a successful quantum attack, but anticipates long-term recovery.

Explains Bitcoin's future-proofing mechanism through hard forks, using the 2017 Bitcoin Cash fork as an example.

Mentions the research into quantum computer-resistant cryptography and the need for community-wide agreement for upgrading Bitcoin.