Google Quantum AI Publishes Cryptocurrency Whitepaper

Google Quantum AI's whitepaper - co-authored with Justin Drake (Ethereum Foundation) and Dan Boneh (Stanford) - is the most authoritative assessment of the quantum threat to cryptocurrency to date. Its headline result: Shor's algorithm against Bitcoin's ECDSA-256 now needs only ~1,200-1,450 logical qubits and fewer than 500,000 physical qubits, a 20x cut over prior estimates. With precomputation, the attack completes in roughly 9 minutes - inside Bitcoin's average block time.

The paper introduces a new attack taxonomy (On-Spend, At-Rest, On-Setup) and sharpens the 'burn or steal' dilemma facing the ~1.7 million BTC locked in P2PK addresses - permanently exposed coins that no fork can migrate. Google verified its findings with a zero-knowledge proof, so the resource estimates can be checked without releasing the attack circuits.