Google’s Quantum Supremacy Won’t Have an Impact on BTC According to Antonopoulos

A long-time and prominent member of the crypto space has just confirmed that Bitcoin is now going to have ‘zip’ to fear from the latest advances in quantum computing from the world’s biggest search engine, Google.

Speaking in a Q&A session yesterday, Andreas Antonopoulos vanished everyone's fears on the recent success for Google’s quantum computing that could have a knock-on impact to cryptocurrency like bitcoin.

“What is the effect on mining and the cryptocurrency world in general? Zip, bupkis, nada, nothing really happens,” he said.

Reports came out last month saying that Google had announced it has used a quantum computer to perform a task, which was interesting because it would take a regular machine take tens of thousands of years to complete.

Dubbed as quantum supremacy, the event sparked immediate concerns about public blockchains.

Antonopoulos said that these were unfounded though. 

“Quantum supremacy, what Google described, is demonstrating the practical applicability of quantum computers to certain classes of problems. Those classes of problems are not the same classes of problems we’re talking about when we talk about breaking cryptography.”

The theory of idea of quantum threatening bitcoin had previously surfaced a few years ago. Antonopoulos likewise dispelling the idea due to the technology’s overall lack of sophistication. 

Nonetheless though, becoming quantum-resistant is one of Bitcoin’s roadmap as a crucial step.

In a separate Q&A session two years ago, Antonopoulos said that the leading cryptocurrency wasn’t vulnerable to such quantum computing attacks. 

In response to a question in regards to whether the US National Security Agency (NSA) had the quantum technology to busty the leading currency, he replied simply with ‘yes’. 

“It is certain that the NSA has already built quantum computers. Google has one in their data center, and if they have one, the NSA has one that’s ten times better,” he continued.

“...Do they use that to break Bitcoin? The simple answer is ‘no.’”

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. For more news on this and other crypto updates, keep it with CryptoDaily!