Blog
A researcher just won 1 Bitcoin by breaking an elliptic curve key on publicly accessible quantum hardware. The gap to Bitcoin's 256-bit security is still vast, but the direction of travel is clear. Here is why how you receive payments already matters more than most people realize.
A few days ago, a researcher named Giancarlo Lelli won 1 Bitcoin by doing something no one had publicly done before: breaking an elliptic curve cryptographic key using a publicly accessible quantum computer. The key was 15 bits. Bitcoin uses 256 bits. That gap is still enormous. But the direction of travel is clear, and the payments industry needs to start thinking about what it means. --- What Actually Happened Project Eleven, a quantum security firm, set up a bounty called the Q-Day Prize to measure real-world progress on quantum attacks against elliptic curve cryptography, the math that protects Bitcoin wallet ownership. The prize went to whoever could demonstrate the largest public break on actual quantum hardware, not simulations, not preprocessed shortcuts. Lelli's April 24 result wa…