Alice & Bob estimates that a quantum computer using about 30,000 physical qubits could crack a Bitcoin private key in 61.8 minutes, according to a preprint targeting the secp256k1 elliptic curve. The estimate assumes no bit-flip errors occur during the computation, a scenario the company equates to a timeframe of about a century before one appears. Its design would require far fewer qubits than Google Quantum AI’s approach, but the computation would exceed Bitcoin’s ten-minute block interval, leaving transactions in progress outside the attack’s reach. Google nevertheless estimated that a machine prepared in advance could extract a private key within nine minutes of a public key appearing, and identified more than 1.7 million BTC held in P2PK scripts that expose public keys on the blockchain. Alice & Bob’s current chips remain well below the required scale, with the company expecting hardware improvements and falling resource estimates to converge in the early 2030s.
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