The crypto industry's reaction was that a quantum computing threat was still distant when Google unveiled its Willow quantum chip in December 2024.

Bitcoin uses SHA-256 for mining and ECDSA for signatures, both of which are theoretically vulnerable to quantum decryption, but the consensus was that the threat was decades away. Breaking encryption would require millions of physical qubits (a unit of information in quantum systems). Willow had just 105.

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