This was exactly the premise of my sigbovik April Fool's paper in 2025 [1]: for small numbers, Shor's algorithm succeeds quickly when fed random samples. And when your circuit is too long (given the error rate of the quantum computer), the quantum computer imitates a random number generator. So it's trivial to "do the right thing" and succeed for the wrong reason. It's one of the many things that make small factoring/ecdlp cases bad benchmarks for progress in quantum computing.

I warned the project11 people that this would happen. That they'd be awarding the bitcoin to whoever best obfuscated that the quantum computer was not contributing (likely including the submitter fooling themselves). I guess they didn't take it to heart.

[1]: https://sigbovik.org/2025/proceedings.pdf#page=146

Project Eleven just awarded 1 BTC for "the largest quantum attack on ECC to date", a 17-bit elliptic curve key recovered on IBM Quantum hardware. Yuval Adam replaced the quantum computer with /dev/urandom. It still recovers the key.

• today at 3:36 AM

• logicallee

  today at 3:45 AM

  but does the quantum hardware do it any faster?

  • petterroea

    today at 3:54 AM

    > The author's own CLI recovers every reported private key at statistically indistinguishable rates from the IBM hardware runs.

    • xienze

      today at 11:56 AM

      I think that means success rate, not speed.

Just to point it out this isn’t a jab at QC but rather a jab at project 11 and possibly the submission author, basically they failed to validate the submission properly and the code proves that the solution is classical.

Recovering a 17bit ecc key isn’t a challenge for current classical computers via brute force.

• aaron695

  today at 3:43 AM

  [dead]

• logicallee

  today at 3:43 AM

  if the solution is faster than random it could still be a real solution on a quantum computer.

  • PunchyHamster

    today at 9:14 AM

    well, it's slower than random

  • amoshebb

    today at 4:57 AM

    “recovers every reported private key at statistically indistinguishable rates from the IBM hardware runs.”

Truly an unfortunate thumbnail crop for this story: https://image.non.io/b3f69546-aeb3-48c3-a76d-723f29b28f48.we...

• NooneAtAll3

  today at 9:46 AM

  > contains the code and submission

  perfection

• functionmouse

  today at 12:11 PM

  yucky

• NetOpWibby

  today at 6:24 AM

  This is fantastic

Pasting my comment from the other article here - curious to understand the degree to which I'm understanding this.

----

The article itself is maddeningly vague on exactly what happened here.

At first blush, it looks like the quantum computer was just used to generate random noise? Which was then checked to see if it was the private key? Surely that can't be.

The github README [0] is quite extensive, and I'm not able to parse the particulars of all the sections myself without more research. One thing that caught my eye: "The key insight is that Shor's post-processing is robust to noise in a way that raw bitstring analysis is not."

"This result sits between the classical noise floor and the theoretical quantum advantage regime. At larger curve sizes where n >> shots, the noise baseline drops below 1% and any successful key recovery becomes strong evidence of quantum computation."

So... is one of the main assertions here simply that quantum noise fed into Shor's algorithm results in requiring meaningfully fewer "shots" (this is the word used in the README) to find the secret?

Someone help me understand all this. Unless I'm missing something big, I'm not sure I'm ready to call this an advancement toward Q-Day in any real-world sense.

0: https://github.com/GiancarloLelli/quantum

does the number of calls to "QM" match between the implementations?

"quantum grifting" has hit the cryptocurrency space brutally.

Scammers can take an old defunct coin or create a new one, buy up/create supply, strap ML-DSA on to it, and pump their shitcoin claiming it's quantum safe, then they can unload.

Eventually low information retail will get wise to this, I honestly don't know who this even works on right now.

A 17 bit key has 131072 possibilities, which is trivially easy to brute force. Defeating it with a quantum computer is still very much a physics demonstration, and not at all attempting to be a useful computing task.

• tsimionescu

  today at 5:45 AM

  The point here is that the quantum computer component of the original solution is not doing anything - that the algorithm being run overall is not actually a quantum algorithm, but a classical probabilistic algorithm.

  If the quantum computer were a key component of the solution, replacing it with an RNG would have either no longer yielded the right result, or at least would have taken longer to converge to the right result. Instead, the author shows that it runs exactly the same, proving all of the relevant logic was in the classical side and the QC was only contributing noise.

• arcfour

  today at 5:30 AM

  Perhaps I'm ignorant, but isn't the idea that you can do it faster than brute force?

  If the results are statistically identical to guessing then it seems like you've just built a Rube Goldberg contraption.

• nkrisc

  today at 9:04 AM

  But if the QC’s contribution is indistinguishable from that of a random number generator, then what is being demonstrated?

Quantum computing is 3 decades old scam. Not even Google was able to prove that their quantum computer works LOL.

weakened algorithms to the extreme (17 bits in 2026 LOL).

• wasting_time

  today at 4:55 AM

  Didn't Google recently report a verifiable quantum advantage?

  https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/research/qu...

  • somenameforme

    today at 12:11 PM

    You know you're blowing your reputation when such claims are met by scientific articles with the headline, "Google claims 'quantum advantage' again." [1]

    [1] - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03300-4

  • josefx

    today at 6:20 AM

    Dont they report an advantage based on simulating quantum effects every other year? I was promissed a quick way to decrypt my old harddrives decades ago, can we have that at some point before the sun burns out?

    • mistercow

      today at 10:25 AM

      Are your old hard drives encrypted using asymmetric cryptography? If not, I'm not sure who made you that promise.

    • IshKebab

      today at 9:50 AM

      The funny thing is we already have PQC so even if quantum computing works, it will be immediately irrelevant.

      At least for breaking crypto, which seems to be its headline feature. Maybe there are other useful things it can do?

      • somenameforme

        today at 12:16 PM

        I expect they're just banking on getting their investment back with some fat returns by licensing it to the NSA to decrypt their hoovered up encrypted coms, with their data storage now reaching up to the yottabyte level. That's a lotta byte.

  • PunchyHamster

    today at 9:15 AM

    On what? They can't run it against anything real

[dead]

Shame that this report is LLM-generated slop.

Imagine investing trillions of dollars on slightly worse random numbers. I suppose it's a better use of money than DEI hiring and political correctness initiatives. At least random numbers don't destroy society systematically.