"Lelli implemented a two-register variant of Shor's algorithm on IBM Quantum cloud hardware, targeting elliptic curves of the form used in Bitcoin's secp256k1 standard. The circuit ran across multiple IBM Heron r2 processors, including ibm_torino and ibm_fez, and relied on techniques designed for noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices."
"Bitcoin developers and cryptographers moved quickly to dismiss the result, contending that the quantum hardware added no meaningful value to the outcome. Project Eleven's X post announcing the milestone now carries a Community Notes fact check, stating that the approach used to recover the 15-bit ECC key depends on classical verification of outputs indistinguishable from random noise."
Giancarlo Lelli was awarded 1 BTC for successfully cracking a 15-bit ECC key using IBM quantum hardware. Bitcoin developers indicated that Lelli's results replicated with random noise, suggesting no quantum advantage over classical methods. The achievement represents a significant increase in search-space complexity but leaves Bitcoin's security intact, as the gap to 256-bit secp256k1 remains vast. Lelli's work, including code and logs, is publicly available, but developers quickly dismissed the results as classical guessing rather than a true quantum breakthrough.
Read at news.bitcoin.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]