We do know that in order to create a new bitcoin block and be rewarded with a fixed amount of bitcoin, that also happens to reduce itself by half after every 210,000 blocks, one BTC mining pool must compute through an enormous amount of calculations and this process requires vasts amount of power. There haven't been many mentions about quantum computers since this whole blockchain technology boom or should we rather say that media has failed to give that too much coverage not that our society's brightest minds stopped working on them. The logical question to ask is how worried should we be about the quantum computers disrupting current bitcoin ecology and attacking the network? Well, we can take a closer look at the following details and draw some conclusions for ourselves.
Possible To Crack Public-Private-Keypairs Via Quantum Computing?
If you haven't heard then the research into quantum computers has reached quite tremendous achievements and the latest one is developed by a team of scientists at MIT. You could call them a group of geniuses but their 5-Atom quantum computer is something from another planet. The potential power that this new machine has is promised to change the way we look at encryptions now, which is a rather worrying thought if we think about the cryptography that holds together blockchain ledgers and essentially all of the currencies. At the same time, we are talking about a very large scale of power that is necessary in order to crack blockchain but whether it is a threat, for now, that is another question to ask.
Are Quantum Computers A Legit Concern To Bitcoin?
At first glance, it might be scary to read that such research and development is a reality, well scary makes it the fact that something so small could potentially break apart another invention that is currently on the rock-solid path to revolutionizing and decentralizing our lives but is it really worth the worry? For now, there is no imminent threat from quantum computing to bitcoin and blockchain technology and one might want to think that by the time that there would be then appropriate upgrades have been applied to the computers running the blockchain as well. There is no large enough of a publicly known quantum computer that could break encryptions of public and private key pairs as yet but how soon we could reach there is a question that you have to look for an answer from the researchers at MIT.