Overview
- Project Eleven awarded 1 BTC to researcher Giancarlo Lelli for using public quantum hardware to derive a 15-bit elliptic-curve key.
- Project Eleven cast the run as proof that resource needs are dropping, citing recent Google and Caltech/Oratomic estimates and the use of cloud hardware.
- Google quantum scientist Craig Gidney said the contest measures the wrong thing and that small, noisy Shor runs can look successful by luck.
- A GitHub check by Yuval Adam reportedly replaced the quantum step with random outputs and produced similar results.
- Bitcoin figures Adam Back and Jonas Schnelli say the tiny key space does not translate to breaking 256-bit Bitcoin keys that need error-corrected, large-scale runs.