Microsoft has recently rolled out a chip called Majorana 1 that its engineers say could point the way to building quantum computers with the scale people once only imagined. Google and IBM have also posted progress updates in recent months, and some in crypto called the news alarming. Related Reading: Ethereum Faith Fading? Samson Mow Says Holders Will Shift To Bitcoin But Graham Cooke, a Google veteran-turned blockchain CEO, pushed back on the panic, saying “Your wallet’s math is stronger than the fabric of spacetime itself.” Majorana 1 And The Million Qubit Claim Microsoft says Majorana 1 uses a new class of material — a “topoconductor” — and an architecture meant to make qubits more stable and easier to scale toward a million-qubit device. The company frames the chip as a step toward practical, fault-tolerant quantum machines that could handle very large problems. That kind of scale is what makes some people worry about cryptography, because certain quantum algorithms work very differently from the classical math that protects keys today. Microsoft built a 1-million-qubit quantum computer. Bitcoin holders are panicking—this could crack crypto encryption. But your seed phrase has 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 combinations. Here’s why quantum still can’t touch it: pic.twitter.com/kiI5oIXej1 — GC Cooke (@GCcookeHQ) August 11, 2025 Google’s Willow And IBM Roadmaps Based on reports, Google’s Willow chip and IBM’s public roadmap have added fuel to the conversation. Google showed a chip that it says solved a benchmark task in under five minutes that, by their measure, would take a classical supercomputer roughly 10 septillion years. IBM has published plans for staged systems — Starling and later Blue Jay — to push toward many logical qubits and extensive error correction over the next several years. Those announcements mean companies are getting closer to solving long-standing engineering problems, but they do not equal an instant ability to undo modern cryptography. Why Bitcoin Isn’t Facing A Panic Right Now Cryptography experts point out that breaking Bitcoin’s elliptic-curve keys needs not just more physical qubits but stable, error-corrected logical qubits and huge run-times. Estimates vary widely, but respected analysis has shown that breaking a 256-bit elliptic curve in a practical time window would require millions or at least many hundreds of thousands of physical qubits once error correction is counted. In short: the path from a lab milestone to a machine that can target Bitcoin addresses at scale still runs through a lot of hard engineering. A 24-word seed phrase? That’s 340 septillion trillion MORE combinations than a 12-word phrase. We’re approaching 10^77 possibilities – nearly as many as atoms in the observable universe (10^80): — GC Cooke (@GCcookeHQ) August 11, 2025 Related Reading: Chainlink Tipped To Outshine XRP In Global Banking Links: Analyst Seed Phrases And Dizzying Numbers Based on reports and public comments from practitioners, wallet math is not the whole story but it matters. Cooke has stressed how large a 24-word seed phrase keyspace is compared with a 12-word phrase, and he used big-picture comparisons — like saying the universe’s age of 14 billion years and “a trillion trillion” restarts — to show how vast those numbers are. Featured image from Getty Images, chart from TradingView
