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.

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.

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

"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.

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

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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

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

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.

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).

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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.