KEY POINTS

  • A Bitcoin wallet containing 69,000 BTC is being passed around in the hacking circle and anyone who breaks it could have access to its coins
  • The current owner of the wallet floats the idea of using a quantum computer to break the wallet
  • Current quantum computers will not be able to break the cryptography in Bitcoin

There's a Bitcoin wallet that's currently being passed around among hackers and crackers and anyone who could crack its password could take with them the 69,000 BTC inside, which is currently worth $690 million.

Twitter user Alon Gal says this particular wallet has been passed around for the past two years, hoping that someone could eventually crack the password. "No success so far," he tweeted. Gal also called the attention of Google in his tweet to hook him up with a quantum computer.

In a follow-up tweet, he says many have privately messaged him asking about the wallet but he’s not going to give it to anyone.

Some Twitter users asked Gal to contact John Cantrell, who had successfully cracked the mnemonic phrase protecting a wallet that Bitcoin investor Alistair Milne put forward on Twitter. Milne ran a challenge on Twitter to anyone who can guess the mnemonic phrase. The difference was that Milne was tweeting one phrase every day. There were 12 words in the mnemonic phrase and Milne already tweeted eight of those words when Cantrell successfully cracked it.

Last year, Google published a scientific paper saying it was able to build a quantum computer that can solve -- in 3 minutes and 20 seconds -- equations that would have taken 10,000 years to perform.

While many think quantum computers could break even the most complicated passwords at some point in the future, present-day quantum computers are nowhere near capable of breaking blockchains and their cryptography.

Ex-Bitcoin developer Peter Todd said present-day quantum computers are "primitive" and using it to break the cryptography in Bitcoin would take a lot of financial cost.

Still, according to Cointelegraph, quantum computers in their current form have the ability to go through more permutations that could break unencrypted passwords. According to multinational firm Deloitte, the current quantum computing technology could expose 25% of all Bitcoin in circulation to an attack. "If enough coins were stolen, the market could potentially crash, undermining confidence in cryptocurrency," the firm said on its website.

quantum
Laser beam in a quantum entanglement experiment. Getty images
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