Billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya has a blunt warning about quantum computing

Billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya has a blunt warning about quantum computing originally appeared on TheStreet .

Billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya has warned that Google revealed breaking common encryption might be closer than we thought.

"If this is even remotely true, combined with everything else happening rn, the only safe trade are hard assets and, dare I say, gold," Chamath posted on X. "Sheesh."

In a blog post on May 23 titled "Tracking the Cost of Quantum Factoring ," Google researchers announced they've drastically lowered the bar for what it would take to break RSA encryption, one of the most widely used security systems on the internet.

"Yesterday, we published a preprint demonstrating that 2048-bit RSA encryption could theoretically be broken by a quantum computer with 1 million noisy qubits running for one week," wrote Craig Gidney and Sophie Schmieg from Google Quantum AI.

Just five years ago, that number was 20 million qubits. Before that? A billion.

RSA encryption is a form of asymmetric cryptography, which is basically a way to lock and unlock data using two separate keys: a public one and a private one. It's used in everything from HTTPS connections to secure emails, logins, and financial transactions.

So what changed? 

Google credits a combination of algorithmic improvements and more efficient quantum error correction.

"The reduction in physical qubit count comes from two sources: better algorithms and better error correction... On the algorithmic side, the key change is to compute an approximate modular exponentiation rather than an exact one."

They pointed to work by Chevignard, Fouque, and Schrottenloher from 2024 that enabled "1000x more operations than prior work," which Google then optimized down to just 2x overhead.

"On the error correction side, the key change is tripling the storage density of idle logical qubits by adding a second layer of error correction," the post added.

This layered correction, plus a new technique called magic state cultivation, means quantum computers may now require far fewer resources to do serious damage.

Why crypto is spooked

While RSA is not used in Bitcoin, the underlying principles matter. Bitcoin's cryptography, specifically, ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm)—is also vulnerable to quantum computing, just like RSA.

And the threat isn't just theoretical. As Google notes:

"For asymmetric encryption, in particular encryption in transit, the motivation to migrate to PQC is made more urgent due to the fact that an adversary can collect ciphertexts, and later decrypt them once a quantum computer is available, known as a 'store now, decrypt later' attack."