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Quantum supremacy – whatever that means – is what Google has quietly announced it accomplished last week. But what does this have to do with Bitcoin (BTC), crypto-currencies and blockchain technologies?
Google is making a quantum leap in computing
Last week, the Financial Times released a staggering report on the tech giant Google. According to an article from a Google researcher, the firm would have managed to create some sort of "quantum supremacy" leaked on the NASA website before being hastily removed. NASA would be involved in the project, hence the leak.
Although there does not seem to be any easily accessible document downloads on the internet, outlets like Fortune have reported that Google claims to have a quantum device (using qubits over traditional bits) that can perform a mathematical calculation complex in three minutes and 20 seconds. According to the newspaper, the same equation would have taken Summit 3 – an IBM supercomputer – about 10,000 years ago.
This is not everything. The so-called article goes on to say that Google is likely to advance its quantum technologies to a "double exponential rate". While it's impossible to verify these claims, some fear that Google will be able to break all the modern encryption over the next decade.
No threat to Bitcoin
It is therefore not surprising that when this news was published, many took it as a sign that the death of encryption is coming. This would mean that Bitcoin and his peers could become useless.
But, these fears can be exaggerated. Fortune, for example, wrote:
"At the moment, public-private key encryption techniques on which Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies are based can not be broken by a quantum computer."
Indeed. Jack Matier, a member of the Quantum Resistant Ledger team (a project focused on creating a blockchain network resistant to quantum computing), recently extrapolated data from the required number of qubits by quantum computers to determine that it will be at least two to five. years before Bitcoin was threatened in any way. And two to five years could be a euphemism, because "there is the persistent problem of correcting errors, which is currently an obstacle to correct and accurate calculations."
Some have even offered to use such a device, but they might not use it to crack Bitcoin. In a video posted on Youtube last year, the legendary promoter of cryptocurrency, educator and coder Andreas Antonopoulos explained that Bitcoin could not only adapt to the quantum threat, but there was no guarantee that the government or any actor with such a device would use it to crack SHA-256. He's particularly focused on the fact that there are clearly much more prestigious targets, from online banks to the world's nuclear codes.
Photo by Tianyi Ma on Unsplash
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