Bitcoin quantum threat contest backfires: Google pros ask organizers to “save what credibility they have left”

One of the top voices in bitcoin (BTC) post-quantum cryptography, Project Eleven, found itself in hot water after its hyped contest turned out to be a nothing burger.

Project Eleven's announcement on Friday regarding the winner of its contest, which was seemingly intended as a warning shot for those still dismissing a quantum computing threat to bitcoin, instead hit the startup itself.

The team said that a researcher, Giancarlo Lelli, was awarded a 1 BTC bounty for breaking a 15-bit elliptic curve key on a publicly accessible quantum computer. According to Project Eleven, "the result is the largest public demonstration to date of the attack class" that threatens crypto assets.

Soon, the announcement on the X platform was community-noted as readers proved that the experiment "did not demonstrate effective quantum key-breaking."

"The method used to recover the 15-bit ECC [elliptic curve cryptography] key relies on classical verification of outputs indistinguishable from random noise, equivalent to classical guessing," the note reads, while other commenters have also emphasized that "the winner’s 'quantum' result works identically with a random number generator," and no quantum computer is needed here.

Besides, the project was also accused by another researcher of the winner copying their code word-for-word, and the contest results were also criticized by Craig Gidney, a research scientist on Google's quantum computing team.

"The ostensible goal of the QDay Prize was to raise awareness about this. Frustratingly, it has likely achieved the opposite result," Gidney said, adding that the competition failed in the way it was predictably going to fail.

"Save what credibility you have left and call a duck a duck. Take it on the chin, and be more careful next time," he added.

Meanwhile, Alex Pruden, the CEO of Project Eleven, which was recently valued at $120 million, admitted that Gidney is right and that the contest "was certainly imperfect."

However, Pruden noted that this space still lacks clear yardsticks for the "Q-Day" and asked for feedback on “how we can better incentivize open benchmarking towards Q-Day risk."

"I also want open benchmarking, and also generally agree with Project11’s mission and advocacy when it’s done well. I don’t have an idea for how to make open benchmarking a thing…for the near term, a blameless post-mortem of the competition could be a constructive next step," Gidney concluded.

As reported by Cybernews earlier in April, Google and the California Institute of Technology warned that cracking cryptography used by blockchains might require far fewer resources and a less powerful cryptographically-relevant quantum computer than previously thought.

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