Does the first quantum computer in Saudi Arabia represent a real threat to Bitcoin?

Source: PortaldoBitcoin Original Title: Will Saudi Arabia's first quantum computer affect Bitcoin? Original Link: Saudi Aramco, the state-owned energy and chemicals company, announced earlier this week the installation of the first quantum computer in Saudi Arabia, an initiative that places the country in the global race of the quantum era, but also raises concerns about the security of Bitcoin and other blockchain networks.

Aramco stated that the 200-qubit quantum computer, built by Pasqal, a French company specializing in neutral atom quantum computing, and installed at its data center in Dhahran, was designed for industrial applications such as energy modeling and materials research.

Pasqal stated that this is the most powerful system the company has ever delivered. A qubit, or quantum bit, is the basic unit of a quantum computer.

“The deployment of our most powerful quantum computer to date is a historic milestone and an important step for the quantum future of the Middle East,” said Loïc Henriet, CEO of Pasqal, in a statement. “Pasqal continues its expansion, providing practical quantum power to the industry.”

Saudi Arabia's initiative places the country alongside the governments of the USA, China, EU, United Kingdom, Japan, India, and Canada, which have funded national quantum computing programs aimed at expanding research infrastructure and training the workforce needed for future fault-tolerant systems.

Experts warn that if quantum machines become powerful enough, they could reveal private keys or forge signatures, allowing attackers to steal funds or compromise privacy mechanisms. But how real is this threat today?

A serious threat or a shot in the dark?

Yoon Auh, founder of Bolts Technologies, stated that the rapid progress in quantum computing has forced security communities to take the threat seriously, amid “repeated leaps” in technology.

“With so much effort and money invested in this, advances are inevitable,” he said. “No one knows when, but the threat is no longer theoretical. It is still not possible to break ECC or RSA – cryptographic algorithms – today, but progress is constant.”

Auh stated that the motivation for the nation-state's investment goes beyond cryptoanalysis. “Quantum computing is the first technology that could become a global digital weapon not controlled by any political system,” he said.

Even so, the research is far from deciphering systems like the one that Bitcoin is based on.

According to the scientific researcher Ian MacCormack, a system of 200 qubits – like the quantum computer from Aramco – is small in practical terms, as current machines are limited by noise and short coherence times, which restricts the number of operations they can perform.

“200 qubits are sufficient to perform some interesting experiments and demonstrations, assuming that the qubits are of high quality, which is difficult to achieve even with so few, but they are far from sufficient to perform error-corrected computation of the type necessary to run Shor's Algorithm,” he said, referring to a quantum algorithm for finding the prime factors of an integer.

Progress Ahead

In September, researchers from Caltech revealed a system of neutral atoms with 6,000 qubits.

However, even machines of this scale are still used for research, simulations, and algorithm development, rather than for attacking cryptography.

“What you need is a very long coherence time compared to the duration of your operations,” said Elie Bataille, a graduate student at Caltech. “If your operations last a microsecond and you have a second of coherence time, that means you can perform about a million operations.”

Researchers claim that threatening modern cryptography would require thousands of logical qubits with error correction, which translates to millions of physical qubits.

Although the Pasqal system has not changed the current security of the blockchain, it has renewed attention to a long-term risk known as Q-Day ( or Q Day ), the moment when a quantum computer becomes powerful enough to derive a private key from a public key and forge digital signatures.

The concern is that such capability not only compromises the encryption used by Bitcoin but also the various security systems that underpin the global economy.

“What a quantum computer could do, and this is relevant to Bitcoin, is forge the digital signatures that Bitcoin uses today,” said Justin Thaler, research partner at Andreessen Horowitz and associate professor at Georgetown University. “Someone with a quantum computer could authorize a transaction, withdrawing all bitcoins from their accounts without their authorization. That is the concern.”

The current early-stage development processors, including Pasqal's 200-qubit quantum computer and Google's 105-qubit Willow chip, are still well below the threshold needed for such attacks.

“Quantum computing has a reasonable probability, greater than 5%, of posing a significant, even existential, long-term risk to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies,” said Christopher Peikert, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan. He added:

“But it is not a real risk in the coming years; quantum computing technology still has a long way to go before it can threaten modern encryption.”