I think Big Tech gets away with treating “user safety” as a compliance checkbox more often than it should, and I’ve said so in this space before. If a $1 billion fine landed on Google for something a European regulator plausibly called a child-safety failure, my first instinct is to side with the regulator. My first instinct is wrong here, and not for the reason Google’s lobbyists would give you.

Google researchers have published findings that tighten the timeline on one of the most consequential threat scenarios in digital finance: a quantum computer capable of breaking the cryptographic foundations of Bitcoin and other blockchain-based assets. The specific target is elliptic-curve cryptography — and more precisely, the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem for 256-bit curves (ECDLP-256), which underlies the key pairs that secure Bitcoin wallets and transactions. The researchers’ updated estimates reduce the quantum computing hardware requirements needed to execute such an attack, meaning the capability threshold is lower than the field previously assumed.