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

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

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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

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