Google announced a new quantum computing chip called Willow, and doomsayers already think it could break Bitcoin in at least two ways.

According to Google, Willow can solve in five minutes a problem that would take most supercomputers 10 septillion years to solve. Critics say that this power could overtake Bitcoin’s hashrate in a matter of minutes, rewrite the Bitcoin blockchain, or even steal Satoshi Nakamoto’s coins.

The price of bitcoin (BTC) dipped slightly yesterday around the time of Google’s 4pm post-market announcement and over the past 24 hours, remains around 3% lower.

Willow reportedly reduces the rate at which qubits “leak” information to the outside, non-quantum environment, improving the chip’s ability to retain information needed for quantum computations. This improves the new chip’s ability to remain quantum instead of becoming a classical chip after too much data leakage.

With its breakthrough, Google moved quantum computing one step closer to becoming a practical reality and potential threat to Bitcoin’s security.

The first threat would be to Bitcoin’s mining network. Bitcoin is secured by a globally distributed network of computer operators who expend time, electricity, and machinery to hash numbers and compete for the right to add and order new transactions atop Bitcoin’s blockchain.

If a quantum computer could suddenly perform most of this computational work at a fraction of the network’s existing time, electricity, and machinery, that computer could overtake the network and censor, reorder, or even double-spend BTC transactions.

Read more: Crypto reacts to superconductor claims that made front-page news

Could Willow steal Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin?

Beyond a hashrate takeover, the second threat people flagged was to Satoshi Nakamoto’s BTC. The Bitcoin creator still owns over 1 million BTC and used a rudimentary pay-to-public-key (P2PK) format to store unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs), which reveals the public address on-chain.

Because Satoshi’s public keys are public, this could give a quantum computer a chance to crack its associated private keys with brute force effort.

Unlike classical chips, quantum chips could execute an exponential amount of computation — as evidenced by Google’s reduction of a 10-septillion-year task to five minutes.

Bitcoin developers abandoned the P2PK format for a system that only reveals the public address during a transaction. Even then, the modern format generates a hash of a hash of the public key receiving the coins.

This not only improves privacy but also limits the allure of brute force attacks, since the attacker would have to decrypt the public key first, and then further proceed to decrypting its private key.

In short, modern standards reduce the chances of exposing the actual public key during most BTC transactions and are, therefore, more quantum-resistant than earlier standards. However, Satoshi’s coins — all of which were mined prior to 2012 — are still vulnerable to this P2PK format attack.

Ava Labs co-founder Emin Gün Sirer recommended freezing Satoshi’s coins and sunsetting P2PK transactions altogether. He also, of course, boasted that he has a method to make digital assets more quantum-resistant.

However, no one has stolen Satoshi’s private keys yet.

Bitcoin hasn’t fallen to a quantum computer yet

Most people, even after Google’s announcement, still doubt that quantum computing actually poses any near-term threat to Bitcoin’s hashrate or Satoshi’s coins.

Google also plans to research potential real-world applications for Willow, which indicates that its accomplishments are impressive yet narrow in scope. It’s not quite ready to leave the lab yet, so to speak. 

It serves as a good reminder, however, to blockchain developers. It’s important to make digital assets more quantum-resistant, and Bitcoin will probably need to hard fork a protocol change in the future to adopt quantum-resistant cryptography.

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On Wednesday, the market capitalization of bitcoin exceeded Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company. According to CompaniesMarketCap, a popular leaderboard that excludes many private assets, bitcoin ‘flippened’ the company for a few hours during Wall Street’s lunchtime. 

That achievement came mere minutes after bitcoin surpassed a popular albeit imprecise measure of the world’s mined silver: 1,751,000 metric tonnes.

Although bitcoin’s retracement to a $1.7 billion market cap on Thursday reinstated the $1.8 trillion Saudi Aramco to its higher rung, bitcoin is still higher than silver and very close to re-flippening Saudi Aramco.

In any case, Bitcoiners are already looking past the oil giant and precious metal. Scanning toward the top of the list, they are seeking their next target to flippen.

Above Saudi Aramco on the leaderboard sit Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, and gold. Which of these will bitcoin flippen next?

The next assets for Bitcoin to flippen

Because assets on CompaniesMarketCap are marked-to-market on a daily basis with changing prices, their rank fluctuates periodically. Nevertheless, as of publication time, the easiest asset to surpass on that list is Alphabet (Google) with its $2.1 trillion market cap.

Bitcoin would need to rally 23% from its current value to surpass that company and rank sixth on the leaderboard.

Close to that number is Amazon, just $0.1 trillion higher than Google as of publication time. A 29% rally for bitcoin from today’s $87,600 price would outrank Amazon.

Above that number is rarified air. At the exosphere of public companies is NVIDIA at $3.6 trillion — more than double the size of bitcoin.

Atop the leaderboard is gold, the world’s most valuable precious metal by total mined supply. Although many gold bugs dispute the amount of gold secretly amassed over millennia in India, China, Russia, and other countries, a popular estimate of its above-ground supply is 208,874 metric tonnes.

Read more: Bitcoin breaks $93,000 amid rumors that Saudi, UAE, or Qatar is buying

What bitcoin needs to flippen gold

If that tonnage is accurate — as with silver, mined supply is a big assumption — then gold has a market cap of $17.2 trillion today.

In percentage terms, gold is at least 900% higher than bitcoin’s market cap. If Asian countries have secret stores of gold, that percentage would increase.

Of course, CompaniesMarketCap does not list many other assets that bitcoin could flippen. There are parks, militaries, real estate, and countries. Residential real estate in Australia alone exceeds $10 billion, for example.

Whether bitcoin will flippen Google, NVIDIA, gold, or any meaningful percentage of global real estate remains to be seen. Certainly, bitcoin does not fit neatly into any prediction model. It has the ability to become one of the world’s biggest assets if its bullish trend continues.

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Bitcoin climbed to $66,000 today, despite Google searches for the currency almost hitting four-year lows and the tech giant removing price charts from its search results.

Searches for the term ‘Bitcoin’ have been steadily dropping over the past three months and reached their lowest point of 2024 between October 13 and 19. Over the past four years, Bitcoin searches were at their lowest on October 12, 2020, with a ranking of 12. On Sunday, they reached 15.

As pointed out by numerous X (formerly Twitter) users, Google has also removed price charts for bitcoin and various other cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin, ether, XRP, and SOL no longer have their own market summaries.

Read more: Is Bitcoin protected by the First Amendment as Michael Saylor says?

Doge, Monero, Tether, Binance Coin, Cardano, and Tron still have market summaries and price charts and it’s worth noting that bitcoin and ether are also still visible on Google Finance.

Since last October, bitcoin’s price has risen from $27,000 to $66,000. Its price has been going back and forth across the $60,000 threshold since March this year.

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A Chinese trader claims that Binance ignored “extremely abnormal transactions” and failed to freeze funds belonging to an “obvious hacker,” leading to them losing their $1 million life savings via a promotional Google plugin.

The trader, who goes by the name ‘CryptoNakamao’ on social media, reportedly used the Aggr plugin to access trading data. However, it actually allowed hackers to find a way around password and two-factor authentication (2FA) protection to gain access to their Binance account.

Once into their account, CryptoNakamao explains that the hacker bought several tokens in the Tether trading pair — which had abundant liquidity – and placed sell orders in Bitcoin, USD Coin, and other trading pairs — which had scarce liquidity.

Then, despite not being able to withdraw funds directly, the hacker was able to open leveraged positions, buy a large amount in excess, and complete their cross-trading.

The trader says they noticed their account trading randomly on May 24 but by the time they got in touch with Binance, it had been drained.

“Throughout the process, the response of Binance staff was very slow and they did not help users recover any losses,” they wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

“Seeing that the exchange interception had completely failed, I sought help from a security company to see if the hacker could be locked down.”

Read more: Big Brother surveillance dystopia is now reality at Binance

Binance knew about the plugin and the hacker’s address

During the course of the investigation, CryptoNakamao claims that, not only had Binance known about the plugin and the nature of the pilot for some time, but it had also received complaints, and had even “tracked down the hacker’s address at least three or four weeks ago.”

Despite this, it still failed to take any action.

Taking to X (formerly Twitter) to vent, CryptoNakamao said:

“Binance knew about the problems with the hacker and the plug-in, but did nothing for several weeks, allowing the promotion to continue, resulting in greater financial losses.

“Hackers manipulated accounts for more than an hour, causing extremely abnormal transactions in multiple currency pairs without any risk control.

“Binance failed to freeze the funds of the obvious hacker’s single account in the platform in a timely manner and it took more than a day before Binance contacted the relevant platform to freeze the transaction.”

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A massive, multi-hour outage of Microsoft’s application programming interface (API) used by its Bing search division has caused unprecedented interruptions for millions of people.

Bing, which has over 9% global search market share, also serves critical features for the privacy-conscious DuckDuckGo search engine, AI tools like ChatGPT, and the code development assistant CoPilot. All were offline today for a number of hours.

Complaints rained in across social media as default search engines for millions of browsers returned errors, suspenseful spinning icons, empty search results, and error pages.

Protos reporters began experiencing search engine errors on Bing and DuckDuckGo a couple of hours after midnight New York time.

Problems at Microsoft look to have begun as early as late Wednesday. By 8pm, Microsoft admitted, “We’re aware of and investing reported issues accessing the Microsoft 365 admin center.”

Read more: Andrew Tate seems confused as he dumps bitcoin to buy GameStop

To call Microsoft a giant is an understatement. It’s the largest publicly traded company in the US with a $3.2 trillion market cap. Despite its size — and trillion-dollar lead on the size of its competitor, Google — it has less than 10% global market share of search queries.

Google, by far the world’s dominant search engine, has over 83% market share.

Google remained online during the Bing and DuckDuckGo outages, providing it hours of invaluable search data from frustrated users of its competitors.

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Google has filed a lawsuit accusing two China-based app developers of using its Play Store to host 87 investment and crypto scam trading apps that have allegedly defrauded more than 100,000 people.

The internet giant claims the two developers, Yunfeng Sun and Hongnam Cheung, stole anywhere between $100 and tens of thousands of dollars from individual victims. As a result, Google claims that investigating the pair cost it $75,000. 

It also reportedly claims the lawsuit is the first of its kind against alleged crypto scammers, with its general counsel saying, “This litigation is a critical step in holding these bad actors accountable and sending a clear message that we will aggressively pursue those who seek to take advantage of our users.” 

The developers had apparently been using the Play Store since 2019 to host crypto and investment apps that faked users’ returns while stealing deposited funds. They are also accused of attempting to extort victims with overpriced withdrawal fees. 

Read more: Fake crypto wallet in App Store for four years drained $120K in Stacks

In doing so, Google claims the two persistently uploaded new apps whenever one was suspended by hiding their identities and making ‘material misrepresentations’ to circumvent its policies. They are also accused of using YouTube, text message campaigns, and paid adverts to promote the fraudulent apps. 

Google has demanded a trial by jury in today’s lawsuit. It accused the defendants of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and breaching contract terms of various Google services, such as YouTube and its developer program. 

Google was almost taken to court when an Irish politician threatened legal action over a series of crypto scams that fraudulently misrepresented him. Google was ordered to hand over identifying information of the scammers and the two settled out of court.

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Tech giant Google must hand over identifying information to Ireland’s second most senior politician about the buyers of crypto scam ads that used his likeness, a court has ruled.

Tánaiste Mícheál Martin of the Fianna Fáil party says ads promising to “transform anyone into a millionaire within three to four months” have damaged his reputation. With this court ruling, Martin aims to hold those accountable.

Local media reports that an agreement was reached between the two parties before heading to court. On Thursday, a judge formally ruled that Google must provide the financial accounts used to pay for the crypto scam ads, along with associated names, IP addresses, and more.

Google said that it won’t object to any court orders — but its legal counsel noted it wasn’t consenting, either. 

Buyers of crypto scam ads join Martin’s naughty list by Christmas

In previous court action, the Fianna Fáil party said that the crypto scam ads displayed “egregious policy violations.” Google took down the paid content and suspended the accounts.

Martin says there’s a strong public interest in identifying the scammers and holding them legally accountable. He told the court he was concerned the ads would not only damage his reputation but erode trust in the political system. 

Martin said in a statement, “Every citizen should be entitled to request and receive information relating to the bad actors behind these schemes. The Tánaiste also believes there is a significant onus on large tech companies, including Google, to do all they can to ensure their platforms and products are not weaponised by bad actors and scammers.”

Read more: Billionaire’s lawyers oppose Meta’s request for crypto scam documents

This latest court order will force Google to give up details of the financial accounts paying for the ads, the IP addresses of those accessing the relevant crypto scam ad accounts, and the names, email addresses, and phone numbers of account holders, all within 21 days.

Account holders linked to the crypto scam ads will likely receive a heads up by Google before it discloses their information.

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