Researcher Breaks 15-Bit ECC Key in Quantum Simulator, Wins 1 BTC

Project Eleven posted an online challenge offering 1 BTC to anyone who could produce the private key matching a provided 15-bit elliptic-curve public key. A researcher recently submitted a demonstration that recovered the private key and provided the verification materials required by the challenge. Project Eleven confirmed the result and completed the payout.

The computation ran on a quantum simulator rather than on physical quantum hardware. The researcher executed a quantum algorithm for the elliptic-curve discrete logarithm problem on a key space limited to 15 bits, equal to 2^15 or 32,768 possible private keys. The submission included simulator configuration, algorithmic steps and verification artifacts.

The 15-bit key size is intentionally small compared with production elliptic-curve keys, which are typically 256 bits or larger. The challenge was a proof-of-concept task meant to encourage testing of quantum cryptanalysis methods on toy instances.

Quantum algorithms such as Shor's algorithm provide a theoretical method to solve discrete logarithms in polynomial time on a sufficiently powerful, error-corrected quantum computer. Present-day physical quantum processors do not have the qubit counts, coherence times or error rates required to run large-scale algorithms that would break standard elliptic-curve key sizes.

Project Eleven verified the provided materials against its published criteria before releasing the bounty. The submission and its supporting artifacts document a simulated quantum computation that recovered a private key for a deliberately small test case.