SHA-256 became a trending topic on X last night after quantum fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) spread across Bitcoin social media.
According to a viral post, financial analysts at Standard Chartered issued a recommendation to sell Bitcoin (BTC) and buy gold based on “credible rumors that a quantum computer has cracked SHA-256.”
Neither of those things actually happened.
No quantum computer has cracked SHA-256 this week, and Standard Chartered did not recommend selling Bitcoin for gold.
The author acknowledged the supposed source of the news as follows:Ah, I made it”
“The BTC community is really this stupid,” they commented on the post's popularity, laughing at X's gullible users.
The original post, which mimicked Bitcoin historian Pete Rizzo's logo style, received over 30,000 impressions, thousands of quote tweets, and hundreds of likes.
Read more: Internet mocks El Salvador's 'quantum-secure' Bitcoin
Another fake quantum attack on Bitcoin
Bitcoin miners use SHA-256 to hash blocks of transactions and earn the right to claim Coinbase rewards and add data to the ledger.
If a quantum computer could crack SHA-256, it could potentially hijack Bitcoin's hashing power and censor or stop new transactions entering the blockchain.
Fake news about BTC is circulating every day on X.
Protoss has previously covered fake news about Saudi Aramco mining BTC, Luke Dash Jr. advocating a BTC hard fork, the Dutch government creating a strategic Bitcoin reserve, Apple buying BTC, California seizing idle Bitcoin, California adopting Bitcoin, Kamala Harris taxing unsold BTC, Amazon adding BTC payment methods, and countless other far-fetched claims on social media.
Most forms of modern encryption, including large-scale internet and financial security services, also Depends on SHA-256.
If a quantum computer were to crack this algorithm, not only BTC but trillions of dollars of the global economy would be at risk.
