David Hoffman

Exactly.

That's right.

And previous estimates were it would take tens of millions of qubits to do this.

Well, they just released it in

Improvement to the algorithm, to Shor's algorithm, that now make it take only 500,000 physical qubits.

And so in a runtime of about nine minutes, if they had the appropriate hardware, again, those 500,000 physical qubits, it would only take nine minutes.

for them to go attack Bitcoin or Ethereum and yoink the keys.

And also, this is not just limited to grabbing quantum vulnerable assets from Bitcoin or Ethereum or other chains.

It also enables on-spend attacks.

So they can intercept transactions before they confirm.

within the block time of something like Bitcoin, within nine minutes, they could intercept a transaction.

Say I send Bitcoin for myself to you, a quantum computer with this amount of hardware could go and yoink and intercept that transaction.

So this breaks Bitcoin, basically.

It also breaks everything else.

It breaks Ethereum.

It breaks everything in crypto if we had that level of hardware.

That's exactly right.

That's the thing to underline is this is an algorithm improvement that reduces the amount of hardware required to go attack these systems.

And so it is still an engineering problem.

Actually, I was wanting to ask this question of how big of an engineering problem is it?