Is your Bitcoin in danger?

Bitcoin price rose on Monday on increasing crypto exchange volume, with a daily green candle of +3% and a weekly jump of +10%.

BTC whale wallets surged as President-elect Donald Trump reaffirmed on CNBC that his administration plans to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve.

“We’re going to do something great with crypto because we don’t want China or anybody else, not just China, but others are embracing it, and we want to be the boss,” Trump said.

But could advances in ultra-fast quantum computing underway at Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., upend the entire blockchain paradigm?

Along with this rumored devastation would likely go much of Bitcoin’s massive market cap, which is currently valued at over $2 trillion. Here’s a quick rundown of what Alphabet is cooking:

Google’s new Willow quantum chip surprises

Google’s Quantum Lab introduced Willow in a December 9 update on the Google blog.

It’s a quantum computing chip, so each bit can be a 0 and a 1 in different orders of arrangement. Consequently, it can be used to perform calculations at much higher performance speeds than conventional Nvidia GPUs, for example.

Google said Willow can solve in just five minutes a problem that would likely take ten septillion (that’s 10^25) years for Frontier to solve.

Frontier is a Hewlett Packard supercomputer that began operating in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in 2022 and was the fastest in the world until it was surpassed by the same company’s El Capitan supercomputer in Alameda, California in November of 2024.

So are your bitcoins safe?

Bitcoin broken? Is Quantum a crypto killer?

If you do the math, you don’t have to worry.

In June 2017, popular YouTube statistician 3Blue1Brown broke down the math for a brute-force attack on a 256-bit password. A brute force attack is guesswork and testing. Bitcoin uses 256-bit public key encryption for passwords and a miner’s fee for mining nodes to track and execute transactions.

To break this level of security with brute force would require a series of guesses around 4 billion times 8 times.

According to 3Blue1Brown’s math:

If every human on Earth had far more computing power than all of Google’s servers probably have, and then you made 4 billion copies of this Earth in a single galaxy, and then made 4 billion copies of that Earth galaxy… and all they did with all those computers was brute force attack Bitcoin for 37 times the age of the known universe since the Big Bang, there would still only be 1 in 4 billion chance of having a “collision” or a correct guess.

And if Google or someone had much more power than that in a server farm and decided to become white-collar criminals and use that correct guess to steal some bitcoins, well, if the rest of the miners noticed the stolen BTC, they could correct the ledger by consensus and prevent the thief node from participating in the network.

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