No, a quantum computer didn’t break SHA-256 or Bitcoin
SHA-256 became a trending topic last night on X after another round of quantum fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) spread across Bitcoin social media.
According to a viral post, financial analysts at Standard Chartered published a recommendation to sell bitcoin (BTC) and buy gold on “credible rumors a quantum computer has cracked SHA-256.”
Neither of those things actually occurred.
No quantum computer cracked SHA-256 this week, and Standard Chartered didn’t recommend selling BTC for gold.
The author admitted the source of the supposed news: “Oh I made it up.”
Laughing at gullible users on X, they commented on the post’s popularity, saying, “BTC community is really this stupid.”
Emulating the side-by-side logo style of Bitcoin historian Pete Rizzo, the original post gained over 30,000 impressions, quote-tweets in their thousands, and hundreds of likes.
Read more: The internet is laughing at El Salvador’s ‘quantum-safe’ bitcoin
Another fake quantum attack on Bitcoin
Bitcoin miners use SHA-256 to hash blocks of transactions and earn the right to claim coinbase rewards and add data to the ledger.
If a quantum computer were ever able to crack SHA-256, it might be able to take over Bitcoin’s hashpower and censor or stall new transactions entering the blockchain.
Fake news about BTC circulates on a daily basis on X.
Protos has previously covered fake news about Saudi Aramco mining BTC, Luke Dashjr advocating for a BTC hard fork, the Dutch government creating a strategic bitcoin reserve, Apple buying BTC, California seizing idle bitcoin, California adopting bitcoin, Kamala Harris taxing unsold BTC, Amazon adding BTC as a payment method, and countless other social media claims that never occurred.
Most forms of modern cryptography, including large internet and financial security services, also rely on SHA-256.
If a quantum computer ever cracked this algorithm, trillions of dollars in the global economy would be at risk — not just BTC.
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