Here's what 'cracking' bitcoin in 9 minutes by quantum computers actually means

Google's quantum paper made headlines with that number. Here's what it means, what's actually at risk, and why 6.9 million bitcoin are more exposed than the rest. What to know : New research from Google's Quantum AI team suggests a future quantum computer could derive a bitcoin private key from a public key in about nine minutes, potentially allowing attackers to hijack transactions before they are confirmed. Roughly one-third of all bitcoin, including early coins and any held in addresses whose public keys have been exposed or reused, could be stolen at leisure by a sufficiently powerful quantum computer without the time pressure of a live transaction. While bitcoin's core mining process would continue to function, the ability to derive private keys from public keys would undermine the network's ownership guarantees, and unlike Ethereum, bitcoin has not yet begun migrating to post-quantum cryptography.