A leading figure in the development of quantum computing has sounded the alarm about the potential impact on Bitcoin's security.
John Martinis, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who led Google's quantum hardware program, believes that the cryptocurrency could be an early target for quantum computers.
The expert points to a recent Google paper that demonstrated how a sufficiently advanced quantum computer could derive a bitcoin private key from its public key in minutes. This vulnerability window occurs when a transaction's public key is exposed before it is confirmed onchain.
While the development of such machines remains an engineering challenge, Martinis estimates a 5-10 year window before they are developed. However, he emphasizes that this does not mean that the cryptocurrency community can wait to address the issue.