On Apr. 24, Project Eleven awarded its Q-Day Prize to Giancarlo Lelli, a researcher who used publicly accessible quantum hardware to derive a 15-bit elliptic curve private key from its public key.
This is the largest public demonstration to date of the attack class that could one day threaten Bitcoin, Ethereum, and every other system secured by elliptic curve cryptography. The prize was one Bitcoin.
The irony is that a researcher won Bitcoin by breaking a miniature version of the math that protects Bitcoin.
A 15-bit key is nowhere near the security of Bitcoin’s 256-bit elliptic curve, and no publicly known quantum computer can break real Bitcoin wallets today.
The result arrives at a moment when the surrounding context has gotten considerably more serious, with Google cutting its ECDLP-256 resource estimates and setting a 2029 migration deadline in the same month.
What Lelli actually did
Lelli used a variant of Shor’s algorithm, a quantum algorithm targeting the elliptic-curve discrete
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