The massive calculating power of quantum computers will be able to break Bitcoin security within 10 years, say security experts.
Bitcoin is taking the world by storm. The decentralized digital currency is a secure payment platform that anybody can use. It is free from government interference and operated by an open, peer-to-peer network.
This independence is one reason Bitcoin has become so popular, causing its value to rise steeply. At the beginning of 2017, a single bitcoin was worth around $1,000. By November 2017, this had risen to around $7,000. Indeed, the total value of the cryptocurrency market is some $150 billion.
A crucial feature of Bitcoin is its security. Bitcoins have two important security features that prevent them from being stolen or copied. Both are based on cryptographic protocols that are hard to crack. In other words, they exploit mathematical functions, like factorization, that are easy in one direction but hard in the other—at least for an ordinary classical computer.
Source/More: Quantum Computers Pose Imminent Threat to Bitcoin Security – MIT Technology Review
