Quantum computing could present a threat to cryptocurrenciesShutterstock/4K_HEAVEN
My first exposure to Bitcoin was unglamorous. It was the early 2010s, and I heard about it through the chatter of students in my college maths classes and the occasional report of the cryptocurrency being used on black markets like the infamous Silk Road. Bitcoin’s siren song rang loudly for some of my peers, but my ears were stuffed with pure physics: Slater determinants, Raman scattering and Cooper pairs. I mean to say that I was striving towards some romanticised idea of being an old-school theoretical physicist, and something like “mining for crypto” just didn’t seem to be a part of that. Recently, however, I have learned that I may have been naïve, as the issue of Bitcoin and its safety became relevant to my work as a physics reporter – and also to my savings.
This change in perspective started a couple months ago when researchers at Google, the Ethereum Foundation (a non-profit that supports the eponymous cryptocurrency) and a couple of universities published a 57-page paper on the threat quantum computers represent to the safety of various cryptocurrencies. I saw the paper while I was eating breakfast in my dining room in Queens, New York, and by the time I made it to New Scientist’s Manhattan office about an hour and a half later, I knew it would overtake my life for the next day.
