Eurykosmotron

Last week Google Quantum AI dropped a 57-page whitepaper that should be keeping every blockchain developer awake at night. The headline finding: Shor’s algorithm can break the 256-bit elliptic curve cryptography underpinning Bitcoin, Ethereum, and most of the crypto ecosystem using fewer than half a million physical qubits on a superconducting architecture. Their circuits could execute in about nine minutes–within Bitcoin’s average block time.

The online magazine beincrypto.com interviewed me on the topic and the headline they came up with was “ASI Alliance Can Rebuild Google’s Secret Quantum Circuit, CEO Ben Goertzel Says” – an angle that I wasn’t really expecting, though I did indeed say that to them, among a bunch of other things.

A number of people have asked me about this in the hours since the article was posted, so I thought I’d write something here to clarify a bit.

Basically: Google withholds the specific quantum circuit they discovered in the name of responsible disclosure, yet the paper itself constrains the search space so tightly that reproducing comparable circuits is well within reach for any serious quantum algorithms group. Including, I would say, our team at SingularityNET, even though quantum is not our main shtick.