Quantum Computers Not a Threat to Bitcoin: MIT Review
Bitcoin’s cryptography is likely to stay impenetrable, as quantum computing is far from being able to solve any important problems right now.
Sankar Das Sarma – a physicist from the University of Maryland – recently wrote at length about why the capabilities of quantum computing are overhyped at the moment. Specifically, he clarifies that quantum computing has evolved nowhere close to the stage required to break the public key cryptography used in popular technologies today – such as Bitcoin.
A Long Way to Go for Quantum Computing
As written in an opinion piece for Technology Review, Sarma suggests that ‘Quantum Computing’ has become the second most overhyped buzzword next to ‘Artificial Intelligence’. Yet despite the substantial investments into quantum R&D from major institutions like Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to produce something of use any time soon.
“Established applications for quantum computers do exist,” states Sarma. For example, there’s a theoretical application of Quantum computing for finding the prime factors of large numbers exponentially faster than existing schemes. This, he explains, is at the heart of breaking RSA-based cryptography widely used for both email and cryptocurrency transactions.
As such, national governments everywhere have devoted great attention and funding to quantum computing. However, what can be conceptualized in theory isn’t always easily built-in practice.
“The most advanced quantum computers today have dozens of decohering (or “noisy”) physical qubits,” said the professor. These qubits are used primarily for a process called “quantum error correction”, which compensates for the fact that quantum states are fast to disappear.
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