IBM Quantum Hardware Cracks 15-Bit ECC Key, but Bitcoin Devs Say Random Bits Match the Result
Key Takeaways: Critics also pointed to a conflict of interest in the prize structure. Project Eleven, backed by Coinbase Ventures, Castle Island Ventures, Variant, and Balaji Srinivasan, created the prize, judged submissions through three independent physicists, awarded the bounty, and then issued press releases warning that approximately 6.9 million BTC held in wallets with exposed public keys faced potential long-term risk. The company sells post-quantum cryptography tools. Pruden acknowledged in a follow-up thread that the result was not Q-Day and that NISQ-era experiments routinely depend on classical assistance. He argued the demo still represented incremental, reproducible progress on accessible public hardware and that migration planning for post-quantum cryptography remains a reasonable long-term priority. The Project Eleven executive added: “Bottom line: This is incremental progress in a noisy, early field — not Q-Day. It highlights why we track resource reductions and why post-quantum migration planning matters for long-term security. Skepticism is healthy; moving goalposts isn’t. Happy to discuss the technical details or share the repo/judges’ feedback.” The gap between Lelli’s result and any practical threat to Bitcoin is substantial. Bitcoin’s secp256k1 curve operates at 256-bit security. The distance from 15 bits to 256 bits represents a factor of 2 to the power of 241 in computational difficulty. Even optimistic recent research, including a Google paper published in April 2026, estimates that breaking 256-bit ECC would require fewer than 500,000 physical qubits, a threshold that current quantum hardware falls far short of. The episode illustrates a tension that has persisted across quantum computing coverage: incremental hardware milestones generate headlines, but the distance between toy-scale demonstrations and production cryptographic systems remains an engineering gap without a near-term solution. Bitcoin’s security model depends on that gap, and developers say it remains intact.Project Eleven Founder Addresses the Criticism
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