Google has issued a wake-up call to the Bitcoin community to take urgent action to upgrade blockchain security as advances in quantum technology increase the risk of fraudulent transactions and theft. Google recently published a white paper warning that quantum computers were already technically capable of intercepting and stealing Bitcoin during an active transaction. University of Auckland professor of mathematics Steven Galbraith (an associate member of New Zealand's Dodd-Walls Centre for Photonic and Quantum Technologies) said the risk was real but not immediate. "There is no evidence that anyone has a quantum computer that can do anything right now," he said. Why the urgency? While the risk might not be immediate, bad actors were already harvesting dormant assets, to decrypt later. "So if someone's interested in your medical data, they can harvest it now by just monitoring what's being sent over the Internet, and then they can just store that on hard disk," Galbraith said. "And then whenever they get a quantum computer in the future, they will be able to decrypt that. And so that's one of the reasons why people are being encouraged to start switching to the post-quantum cryptography (PQC). Why Bitcoin's blockchain is at particular risk Nobel-prize winning physicist John Martinis who helped build Google's quantum computers said the research showing how a quantum computer could break Bitcoin encryption in minutes should be taken seriously. While there was an industry solution to protect data using PQC, it was expected to take years to fully implement and upgrade vulnerable assets, though about 20 percent of internet traffic was already protected. Galbraith said systems that were regularly upgraded by big tech and banks were moving in the right direction, but legacy systems, which did not receive regular security updates, such as Bitcoin's blockchain, were at risk. While the