New Chinese Quantum Computer breakthrough - should we be concerned?

[covfefe_]

With a computer of such power, you could crack bank accounts, any online account. Pretty much anything so why would you waste it hacking bitcoin wallets when there are banks full of suckers' money?

The government (Chinese or any) can already crack any bank accounts and online accounts. It's the bitcoin that's giving them a headache. China (as well every other country) are moving to a complete facial surveillance and they want every of the transaction to occur online on the governments term. Bitcoin is a way of evading the surveillance. Bitcoin is also associated as a tool to hide the wealth form CCP in China. China have reasons to allocate resources to stop bitcoin. They don't need to steal it.

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[bryant.coleman]

First of all, I would be vary of any such claims from China. From what we have seen during the last 2-3 decades, technological innovation in China is ages behind that of the developed nations. Most of their so called "innovations" are plagiarized and rebrabded content from Western nations and Russia. Even if by some miracle they have invented such a quantum computer, I don't think that we have to worry much. The core developers will change the code to take that in to account.

[Bronsted]

It is important to understand how bitcoin works and how quantum technology can potentially harm Bitcoin.

With quantum computers, you can:
1. Crack private keys with the corresponding ecdsa public key pair. This also means that most Bitcoins are not in danger as you only reveal public key when you spend bitcoins. SHA256 and RIPEMD-160, or HASH160 is revealed in a transaction that sends Bitcoin. You have to break both algorithms to get the public key.
2. Potentially hash faster than others. This is not of any danger. The faster they hash, the higher the difficulty increase and thus resulting in the quantum computers being useless.

To mitigate this, you have to stop reusing address. Quantum computers will reduce the time needed to get the private key from the public key exponentially but it will not mean that keys can be cracked instantly. If you can confirm the transactions before the quantum computers can crack the public key that you include in a signature, then you don't have to worry about it at all.