Qubit estimates to break Bitcoin fall below 900 logical qubits, new Pareto frontier shows
markjeffrey · x · 2026-10-20
Estimates for breaking Bitcoin's secp256k1 keep falling: required logical qubits dropped from 2,300 (Litinski) to Google's 1,175 and now below 900 in Jieyi Long's (Theta Labs) latest work, with AI helping optimize the algorithmic circuits. On hardware, IonQ estimates breaking a Bitcoin private key would need 20,000 physical qubits over 26 days — exactly what its own roadmap targets (20K physical / 1,600 logical). The linked ECDSA.fail site publishes a live challenge tracking the Pareto frontier of circuit constructions.
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