Whoa, could it be that Bitcoin might suddenly not need to fear quantum computers as much anymore? Two recent papers, when pieced together, suggest a pretty wild possibility. Oxford physicist Tim Palmer published a peer-reviewed paper in PNAS this year, proposing a model of 'rational quantum mechanics': The real world might have a physical limit on the scale of entanglement needed to sustain full quantum behavior. Based on his calculations, current quantum bit technologies might hit this limit at around 200–400 qubits. Even with future advancements, he suggests the upper limit wouldn’t exceed roughly 1,000 qubits. On the flip side, a quantum cryptography paper updated this August managed to reduce the resource requirements for using Shor’s algorithm to attack a 256-bit elliptic curve down to 835 logical qubits. Bitcoin’s secp256k1 falls into this category. So, here’s an interesting question: If Palmer is right, and the actual sustainable large-scale coherent entanglement is stuck at a few hundred qubits for the long term, then quantum computers might never reach the scale needed to attack Bitcoin. #Bitcoin #QuantumComputing #Crypto $BTC $ETH