IonQ Estimates Quantum Computing Power Required to Compromise Bitcoin Cryptography

IonQ has released a resource estimate suggesting that a fault-tolerant quantum computer with approximately 20,000 physical qubits could break the secp256k1 elliptic curve cryptography used by Bitcoin in about 26 days. The study, which utilizes IonQ’s Walking Cat architecture, calculates that running Shor’s algorithm for this task would require 19,397 physical qubits, 1,457 logical qubits, and 39 million logical Toffoli gates.