Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Competition to Break Bitcoin's Cryptography and win 1 BTC
by
Pmalek
on 19/04/2025, 07:13:27 UTC
From all the videos i have watched on QC, i don't think i have seen any personal owned.
probably, not more than 90% of world population have come in contact with it.
This should be more of an institutional competition, but at the same time, they will have to weigh their options considering how expensive it is.
I assume you wanted to say that more than 90% of the people have never heard of or been in contact with quantum computers instead of what you wrote.
Anyone is allowed to rent quantum computing power and attempt to crack their ECC keys, be it an individual, a small or massive team. That's what they meant. It's not an exclusive challenge for institutions or businesses, although they are better suited for it because of the costs.

Does the 1BTC prize actually worth the time taken to run a QC till 2026?, i don't think so.
Of course not. You wouldn't have the QC doing the computational work constantly. The investments would be in the millions.

Where I can find the exact keys? Because I think it may be a good exercise, to first break all of them classically, and just see, how they generated these small elliptic curves. Breaking ECDSA is one thing, but discovering the exact way of how secp160k1, secp192k1, secp224k1, and secp256k1 was made, is also a challenge in itself (specifically: how their generators were picked).
If you are interested in taking part, I suggest you read all rules of participation carefully. The first step would be to sign up. After that, there will surely be a way to contact the team and request a specific key range to attack. They are interested in having participants use quantum computers with Shor’s algorithm for the cracking process. You might not be eligible for rewards if you don't follow the rules.