Tag: cryptographic

The post How New Machines Could Break Bitcoin’s Code appeared com. Bitcoin The cryptocurrency world has faced regulators, hackers, and market crashes but its most formidable threat might come from a lab, not a trading floor. The Machine That Could Break Math Quantum computers don’t think like ordinary machines. By leveraging the strange principles of quantum mechanics particles existing in multiple states at once they can process calculations at unimaginable speed. A computer powerful enough to exploit that fully could, in theory, unravel the encryption that secures nearly every digital asset in existence. To most, that still sounds like science fiction. To others, it’s a ticking clock. A Venture Capitalist Looks Ahead At the Global Blockchain Congress in Dubai, Amit Mehra, partner at Borderless Capital, described his firm’s growing focus on quantum resistance technologies designed to protect blockchains against quantum attacks before the threat arrives. In his view, the industry has been lulled into complacency. “When chip technology and computational power are improving this quickly, the timeline can collapse overnight,” Mehra said. He predicts meaningful breakthroughs could appear before the decade’s end, warning that proof-of-work systems like Bitcoin will be among the first to feel the impact. Bitcoin’s Encryption at Risk Every Bitcoin wallet and transaction depends on cryptographic keys enormous mathematical locks designed to be impossible to guess. Quantum computing threatens to make those locks guessable again. A system capable of running Shor’s algorithm on a large enough scale could, in theory, derive private keys from public ones, rendering traditional wallets defenseless. If that happens, ownership itself becomes meaningless. Every coin, every NFT, every encrypted asset could be stolen or forged. The Alarm From the Market Side Not everyone is content to wait for the.