Alice & Bob estimates 29,588 physical qubits could derive a Bitcoin key in about 62 minutes
Researchers at the French startup Alice & Bob calculated that a hypothetical quantum computer could need 29,588 physical qubits (forming 1,462 logical qubits) and about 61.8 minutes to derive a Bitcoin private key from its public key using Shor's algorithm on the secp256k1 curve. The design relies on the company's superconducting cat qubits and assumes a certain error correction speed and an extremely low error rate. The main configuration was worked out for RSA-2048, and the secp256k1 figures were derived from the same operations, so the Bitcoin estimate is described as an upper bound. The figure is about 17 times below the under-500,000-qubit benchmark Google researchers presented in March, though the comparison is conditional because the studies assume different hardware and technical assumptions.