United StatesGoogle says Willow cut magic-state errors about 40-fold.
Some of bitcoin’s oldest coins have had their keys exposed on-chain since they were mined.
Magic states fuel certain quantum operations and are consumed on use, so hardware making them cannot do other work.
Willow kept only 8% of attempts, and the result is not a 40-fold cheaper attack.
One modelled attack needs roughly 500,000 reliable magic states a second, and the researchers say larger-scale runs are still ahead.
How each outlet framed it
- CoinDesk
- stresses that magic-state preparation, not qubit count, is the bottleneck; the 40-fold error cut is an engineering step, not a cheaper Bitcoin attack
Sources: CoinDesk