TechFlow News, April 6: According to a PRNewswire report, BTQ Technologies has published a research paper titled “Kardashev Scale Quantum Computing for Bitcoin Mining,” which presents the first quantitative assessment of the full physical cost—including energy, hardware, and infrastructure—of using quantum computing for Bitcoin mining. The study clarifies a longstanding market misconception regarding two distinct types of quantum threats: (1) attacks against Bitcoin’s elliptic curve digital signatures—which are realistic and imminent; and (2) quantum-accelerated mining based on Grover’s algorithm—which, while theoretically possible, incurs prohibitively high practical costs.
The BTQ paper argues that to meaningfully influence Bitcoin’s consensus mechanism, one would need to build a quantum computing cluster whose energy consumption vastly exceeds the total energy output of present-day human civilization. The paper also introduces an open-source resource estimation model covering key components including reversible double SHA-256 computation, fault-tolerant quantum error correction, and large-scale qubit scheduling. Its conclusion underscores that Bitcoin’s more immediate and realistic threat stems from cryptographic signature vulnerabilities—not from quantum mining capability.
