One million quantum operations, just 5 errors. Bitcoin’s countdown has ticked forward another notch 🦖
📈 进群看今日思路
On October 20, quantum computing company Quantinuum announced that its commercial system Helios had achieved 99.9995% logical fidelity—that’s just 5 errors per million operations. That error rate is 10 times lower than its own record set in September, and 100 times lower than Google’s best publicly reported result for a superconducting system. The company’s timeline calls for delivering Apollo, a general-purpose fault-tolerant quantum computer, in 2029.
First, let’s be clear about what this means. The bottleneck in quantum computing over the past few decades hasn’t been the number of qubits—it’s error correction. Physical qubits are too error-prone, so dozens of them have to protect a single logical qubit. Helios uses a color code, with each logical qubit requiring at most 37 physical qubits in exchange for a lower logical error rate. More importantly, the team found that each increase in code distance reduced the remaining logical errors by another factor of 12. This exponential decrease is what makes fault-tolerant computing viable. Robin Blume-Kohout, co-director of the Quantum Performance Laboratory at Sandia National Laboratories, was not involved in the research. His assessment: a logical qubit is nearly 100 times better than the physical qubits that make it up. Scaled to fewer than one million physical qubits, this system could potentially reach the reliability needed for useful fault-tolerant computing.
Why is this news shaking the crypto world? Because Bitcoin account security relies on elliptic-curve signatures. Once a public key is exposed on-chain, a sufficiently powerful quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm could, in theory, derive the private key. Earlier this month, nine blockchain organizations formed the Quantum Alliance. Its estimate: around 6.04 million bitcoins—about 30% of the total supply—are quantum-exposed. Most of these coins are in early P2PK addresses and old wallets that reused public keys. The forecast window cited by the alliance already points to the late 2020s, with one model marking March 2028 as an early window. Research from Google Quantum AI has also brought the number of qubits needed to break Bitcoin’s encryption below 500,000 ⚠️
My take: No machine can break Bitcoin yet. But the question has changed from whether one can be built to how long it will take. The real danger isn’t that Bitcoin will suddenly be broken one day; it’s that the migration window takes time. Addresses need to be changed, wallets upgraded, and keys replaced at custodians and cross-chain bridges. These things take years. A leading exchange has already urged Bitcoin developers to get started now, and an alliance backed by BlackRock, Strategy, and that exchange has invested $15 million 🔐
For everyday holders, there’s no need to panic in the short term. But here’s one small thing you can do now: move coins from old addresses created before 2015 to new addresses. Addresses whose public keys have never been exposed are in a completely different risk category.
Do you still have old addresses in your wallet that haven’t been touched in years? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Every day, I bring you the latest in crypto—not just what’s happening, but the logic and opportunities behind the news 👀🚀
Tap my profile picture to watch the livestream
📈 进群看今日思路
On October 20, quantum computing company Quantinuum announced that its commercial system Helios had achieved 99.9995% logical fidelity—that’s just 5 errors per million operations. That error rate is 10 times lower than its own record set in September, and 100 times lower than Google’s best publicly reported result for a superconducting system. The company’s timeline calls for delivering Apollo, a general-purpose fault-tolerant quantum computer, in 2029.
First, let’s be clear about what this means. The bottleneck in quantum computing over the past few decades hasn’t been the number of qubits—it’s error correction. Physical qubits are too error-prone, so dozens of them have to protect a single logical qubit. Helios uses a color code, with each logical qubit requiring at most 37 physical qubits in exchange for a lower logical error rate. More importantly, the team found that each increase in code distance reduced the remaining logical errors by another factor of 12. This exponential decrease is what makes fault-tolerant computing viable. Robin Blume-Kohout, co-director of the Quantum Performance Laboratory at Sandia National Laboratories, was not involved in the research. His assessment: a logical qubit is nearly 100 times better than the physical qubits that make it up. Scaled to fewer than one million physical qubits, this system could potentially reach the reliability needed for useful fault-tolerant computing.
Why is this news shaking the crypto world? Because Bitcoin account security relies on elliptic-curve signatures. Once a public key is exposed on-chain, a sufficiently powerful quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm could, in theory, derive the private key. Earlier this month, nine blockchain organizations formed the Quantum Alliance. Its estimate: around 6.04 million bitcoins—about 30% of the total supply—are quantum-exposed. Most of these coins are in early P2PK addresses and old wallets that reused public keys. The forecast window cited by the alliance already points to the late 2020s, with one model marking March 2028 as an early window. Research from Google Quantum AI has also brought the number of qubits needed to break Bitcoin’s encryption below 500,000 ⚠️
My take: No machine can break Bitcoin yet. But the question has changed from whether one can be built to how long it will take. The real danger isn’t that Bitcoin will suddenly be broken one day; it’s that the migration window takes time. Addresses need to be changed, wallets upgraded, and keys replaced at custodians and cross-chain bridges. These things take years. A leading exchange has already urged Bitcoin developers to get started now, and an alliance backed by BlackRock, Strategy, and that exchange has invested $15 million 🔐
For everyday holders, there’s no need to panic in the short term. But here’s one small thing you can do now: move coins from old addresses created before 2015 to new addresses. Addresses whose public keys have never been exposed are in a completely different risk category.
Do you still have old addresses in your wallet that haven’t been touched in years? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Every day, I bring you the latest in crypto—not just what’s happening, but the logic and opportunities behind the news 👀🚀
Tap my profile picture to watch the livestream