Make a 256-qbit quantum computer, find all the bitcoins in the pool (takes about a few seconds), register them to yourself, and they will all be worth exactly shit when the word gets out. Don’t even need to repeat for every crypto currency out there, because they will all be immediately worthless. Time until that happens, two years, three at max.
C’mon, now you’re just reposting clickbait. :)))
The real implications of quantum computing are much scarier than breaking Bitcoin. 256-bit quantum computer is able to break most of the current cryptography. You can crack any https site, any wifi network, any bank or broker and so on. Once you have that power, you go for the Fed, or for the PBOC, for the gold vaults and the similar. You don’t waste your time on a small market cap stuff such as Bitcoin because as soon as your capabilities become known, the landscape changes and people start urgently securing stuff. You have to pick your targets carefully, because you don’t have unlimited amount of quantum processing power, and the one you have is not cheap, at least not initially.
Time is a big factor though. It takes a huge amount of time to scale this stuff because adding each additional qubit is a huge effort, a lot like chasing nines in high availability computing. So far it seems D-Wave is right when they say that it can’t be done in academia or research labs alone, that is, without commercialization of technology. And they would know because they’re the only ones actually producing commercially available and scalable quantum computers (although not the kind that can break cryptography, as they can’t run either Shor’s or Grover’s algorithms).
Probability of Bitcoin becoming worthless because of quantum computers is about the same as the probability of gold becoming worthless because of gold asteroid crashing to Earth. Possible, but extremely unlikely. Addressed on Bitcoin wiki since about 2016.
In short, optimistic estimate date of Google’s 256-bit quantum computer prototype is 2022, and Bitcoin is able to soft fork to Lamport signatures in about… few months at most, including usual amount of bickering. Security soft forks have taken as little as a few hours in the past.
That’s assumed. However, what people don’t usually think about is that bitcoins are a subset of that.
No. The gold asteroid thing is nonsense, because Earth is the most heavy-metal-rich body in the solar system, as evidenced by the ratio of strength of its magnetic field and its mass. If people have difficulties digging up the gold here, those difficulties would rise exponentially elsewhere. Basically, we already have access to the cheapest and most accessible gold.
On the other hand, the cryptography based on primes being cracked by quantum computers is not even a matter of probability, it is basically a certainty within a time period of a few years. The fact that ssl is based on the same type of crackable cryptography is of course a problem, but guess what isn’t affected by this? Precious metals. So, quite opposite from crypto being the future and gold being an obsolete historical relic, crypto has no future whatsoever, and metals are likely to be the basis of every conceivable currency for quite a bit into the future.
I have precisely the opposite experience(s). Bitcoin is usually the first thing people think of when they consider dangers of quantum computers, and the first danger people think of when they hear about Bitcoin is quantum computers. What they usually disregard (especially the media and the people from the financial sector which, to be frank, you yourself are a part of ;P ) is that any kind of money or property today runs on the same cryptography. Money you have in the bank is protected by https; break https and you can transfer money to another account. Your ownership of your house/land is tracked in land registry which is usually electronic and accessible through the Internet. Even metal is not safe, as it’s likely that majority of precious metal is stored in central vaults and tracked through systems that are accessible online. Only the metal you store under mattress is safe if cryptography breaks, and price is certainly not guaranteed as price discovery today works only through Internet.
That’s why I’m saying that “mining the gold asteroid leads to crashing gold price” is precisely the same argument as “quantum computers crashing bitcoin price.” It’s possible, but such stuff involves huge costs in both time and resources and is unlikely to happen overnight.
You could say that someone could develop quantum computers in secret. That is plausible, and especially military has huge incentive to do that. However, it’s not likely. You need years of incremental progress and collaboration between extremely smart people which are extremely rare and unlikely to be located in the same country. Inventing that stuff in academic circles with global collaboration and what is basically the open-source model is hard enough, and by going stealth you limit your resources to the point you can’t keep up with academia, let alone achieve breakthrough after breakthrough and build not just a single slow quantum computer but a few generations of quantum computers.
In other words, military developing quantum computers is as likely as gold asteroid whooshing through from the Oort cloud and crashing right beside Fort Knox. It’s possible, just… not very likely.
But I can’t know what can happen. I’m certainly not an expert in quantum computing. I’m just evaluating probabilities. And don’t get me wrong – I’m not easily disregarding your opinion regarding quantum computers and cryptocurrencies. If nothing else, you’re way smarter than me and you’ve historically had much better track record in guessing what’s happening than me, so I’m considering what you’re writing very carefully. But regarding this particular subject, your arguments are pretty weak so far; if it’s a problem for Bitcoin, it’s also a problem for far more important stuff than Bitcoin and can’t be used to dismiss Bitcoin. It would be completely different if Bitcoin was the only type of money, but I don’t believe that’s likely to ever happen and we’re certainly very far from that possibility today.
Probability of China and Russia not working on it is negligible. Russia, especially, is much better than everyone else at hard science. Also, the probability of NSA not having something in development for cracking encryption is negligible. It’s just a matter of who acquires the capability first, and then who reveals it. Motivation of superpowers for having ability to crack prime-based cryptography is vast. I expect google to be lagging behind state actors significantly.
That’s true – they are most certainly working on it, and Russia has a physics know-how and probably better chance than others of keeping it a secret. But I still feel that nobody has cracked it at a significant scale yet, I have a feeling this is a problem similar to fusion, that’s kinda within reach, but it needs to become the whole industry to become really usable.
On that topic, I’ve stumbled across this talk which gives excellent insider overview on how state agencies work with tech stuff internally. I would expect technology this kind of technology to spill over to the private sector, or be simultaneously rediscovered in the private sector, especially in case of USA and China. On the other hand, it is known that Lockheed Martin has been buying D-Wave hardware since 2011 – and we all know who is probably the biggest Lockheed Martin’s client. So they most certainly have something that’s not (yet) accessible to the public, but the question is how advanced that stuff really is.
BTW if a gold asteroid crashed into Earth, its content would evaporate and disperse globally, the way iridium from the Chicxulub event can be found globally in the KT boundary geological layer, it would not produce a big chunk of gold inside a crater, so no, that wouldn’t influence gold price in any way, unless it’s an extinction level event in which case the price of gold would obviously drop significantly. 🙂
With asteroids, think huge thermonuclear warhead, not bullet hitting a target. And if you actually find something in the crater, it means the impactor was so small its more valuable as a museum piece than the market value of its gold content. Think existing meteorite impacts; they all fall in two basic groups, “a chunk of iron found” (bullet-type), or Tunguska-type explosions (nuke-type).
https://www.bug.hr/tehnologije/google-tvrdi-da-je-postigao-kvantnu-nadmoc-11465
Yeah, I linked something similar, only from Infowars.
Ah, sorry, it seems my brain auto-filters links on generic words dismissing them as “wiki links”, like “quantum computer” in this case.