Quantum Bitcoin Mining |
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| Authors: | Robert Benkoczi Daya Gaur Naya Nagy Marius Nagy Shahadat Hossain |
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| Affiliation: | 1.Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, AB T1K 3M4, Canada; (R.B.); (D.G.); (S.H.);2.College of Computer Science and IT, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, Dammam 34212, Saudi Arabia;3.College of Computer Engineering and Science, Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University, Al Khobar 31952, Saudi Arabia; |
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| Abstract: | This paper studies the effect of quantum computers on Bitcoin mining. The shift in computational paradigm towards quantum computation allows the entire search space of the golden nonce to be queried at once by exploiting quantum superpositions and entanglement. Using Grover’s algorithm, a solution can be extracted in time , where t is the target value for the nonce. This is better using a square root over the classical search algorithm that requires tries. If sufficiently large quantum computers are available for the public, mining activity in the classical sense becomes obsolete, as quantum computers always win. Without considering quantum noise, the size of the quantum computer needs to be qubits. |
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| Keywords: | Bitcoin quantum algorithms quantum security blockchain hash functions |
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