Google's new quantum chip renews worry about old bitcoin wallets
Google announced progress on a quantum computing chip called Willow, which is a type of computer that works very differently from normal computers and could, in theory, eventually break the math that protects bitcoin wallets. The specific worry is about very old bitcoin addresses from the Satoshi era (the earliest days of bitcoin) because their security setup is more exposed than newer wallets.
This isn't about most people's bitcoin holdings today, since current wallets use safer address formats, but it matters because it shows the quantum threat to crypto is getting closer to real rather than purely theoretical.
If you're using a normal modern wallet, there's nothing to do right now. If you happen to control very old bitcoin from before 2010, it may be worth researching moving those funds to a newer address format, but this isn't urgent.
- quantum computing
- A very different type of computer that uses physics tricks to solve certain math problems far faster than normal computers, including some problems that current crypto security relies on being hard to solve
- Satoshi-era bitcoin
- Bitcoin from the earliest days (around 2009), often associated with bitcoin's anonymous creator, stored using older, less secure address formats
- address format
- The technical way a crypto wallet's address is set up; newer formats hide more information and are harder to attack