As Justin Drake, one of the main developers of the Ethereum Foundation (EF) and a co-author of the research paper, confirmed in a June 1 publication in X magazine, the US government blocked Google from releasing the complete system used in a paper published last March on Bitcoin and quantum threats.
According to Drake, this omission was not Google’s choice.
Instead of following standard academic processes, the optimization was kept secret and hidden behind a zero-knowledge proof. Google’s blog post says it “worked with the U.S. government.”
Justin Drake, developer of the Ethereum ecosystem and co-author of the Google Quantum AI paper.
Drake claimed to have witnessed the circumstances surrounding the decision and claimed that his ability to provide further details was limited. But he described what happened as “academic censorship.”.
Ethereum Foundation collaborators have not disclosed which government agency intervened or what arguments were brought forward to justify the block. The most direct inference is that the U.S. government believed that disclosing the complete circuit was equivalent to providing an attack manual to a strategic adversary..
Regarding the threat situation, In his book, Drake reiterated his estimate of a 50% chance. Quantum computers could crack 10% of the cryptography used in networks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum by 2032, and by 2030.
As reported by CriptoNoticias, paper Researchers on the Google team suggested that a quantum computer could compromise Bitcoin encryption in less than nine minutes using less than 500,000 physical qubits (20 times fewer resources than thought), but Google Quantum AI did not reveal the circuitry that would enable the attack. Instead, Google researchers published a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof. We confirmed their existence without showing their circuits.
However, on June 1 of this year, researcher Andre Schlottenlohr reconstructed and published a quantum system stored by Google Quantum AI, claiming that it produced more efficient results than what Google had reported.
Ledger’s chief technology officer cited interference from the U.S. government.
Charles Guillemet, chief technology officer at Ledger, reflected on Drake’s points:
Google did not choose to keep the circuit private. The US government blocked its publication. The blog put it diplomatically (“We engaged with the US government”). What should I call it? A diplomatic cover for a publishing block.
Charles Guillemet, Ledger CTO.
The executive argued that cryptologist Scott Aaronson has warned about that threshold – the moment when researchers who estimate the resources to break the cryptographic systems in use will stop publishing – and that that moment has already happened. “The actor forcing silence is not Google’s PR team. “It’s the government.”
Guilmet also doesn’t characterize recent developments as an immediate breaking point for Bitcoin. “Quantum computers that can run these circuits don’t yet exist.”. According to the executive, what has changed is the reliability of the system’s deadlines.
What has changed is that all public timelines after the quantum transition are now honest. Currently, public records are clearly thinner than reality, with classification on one end and AI-powered re-derivation on the other.
Charles Guillemet, Ledger CTO.
With this, Guilmet points out that the actual knowledge about quantum threats exceeds the knowledge contained in official documents in two ways. on the one hand, Government classifies results researchers cannot publish;an artificial intelligence agent, on the other hand, reconstructs from the outside what it was trying to hide.
Guilmet concluded that what the government is trying to classify more accurately defines the actual risks that quantum computing poses to Bitcoin encryption than what researchers are currently allowed to make public.
(Tag Translate) Bitcoin (BTC)
