Researchers And AI Agents Cut Estimated Quantum Cost of Attacking Bitcoin Encryption by 86%

Insider Brief

• An open research project using human scientists and AI agents cut the estimated quantum resources for a key step in attacking blockchain encryption by 86.1%.
• The best circuit at the study’s cutoff used 1,151 logical qubits and about 1.3 million Toffoli gates for elliptic-curve point addition.
• The results do not demonstrate a working attack and exclude several costs required to run Shor’s algorithm on future fault-tolerant quantum hardware.
• Photo by fabio on Unsplash

An open research project combining human scientists with AI agents has sharply reduced the estimated quantum computing resources needed for a key step in attacking the encryption used by Bitcoin, Ethereum and other blockchain networks.

The study, posted on arXiv, describes how more than 100 contributors improved a quantum circuit for elliptic-curve point addition, one of the main arithmetic operations required to run Shor’s algorithm against elliptic-curve cryptography. The researchers reduced their principal measure of the circuit’s resource cost by 86.1% from the project’s starting point.

The team added that this result — with qualifications — is about 50% below a point-addition benchmark reported by a Google team recently.