Let's talk about things that actually matter - where to invest in post-quantum world?
I'll keep this short.
- Google’s Willow quantum chip significantly outpaces current supercomputers, solving tasks in minutes that would otherwise take billions of years.
- Hypothesis: Accelerating advancements in tech and AI could lead to quantum supremacy arriving sooner than the 2030s, contrary to expert predictions.
- Legacy banking systems, being centralized, could transition faster to post-quantum-safe encryption by freezing transfers, re-checking processes, and migrating to new protocols in a controlled manner.
- Decentralized cryptocurrencies face bigger challenges:Hard forks are difficult to coordinate across a decentralized network.
- Transitioning to quantum-safe algorithms could lead to longer transaction signatures and significantly higher fees, eroding trust in the system.
- If quantum computers compromise current cryptography, tangible assets (e.g., real estate, stock indices) may retain more value compared to digital assets like crypto.
The benchmark is called "random circuit sampling". https://blog.google/technology/research/google-willow-quantu... I call it a benchmark because a random circuit is probably not useful, but quantum computers are useful for simulating quantum systems including materials science, particle physics etc. This result is separate from the error-corrected qubit result and did not use error correction. There is a third result in the paper, which is a repetition-coded qubit that was stable for almost an hour. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08449-y
Willow only implements one single error corrected logical Qubit, using over 100 physical qubits. So far the test they have done is only applicable to an extremely narrow problem domain, approaching the limit of how practically useless a problem domain can be. I may be exaggerating slightly.
As Google's own team report "Google will only consider itself to have created a “true” fault-tolerant qubit, once it can do fault-tolerant two-qubit gates with an error of ~10-6". That's two logical qubits.
The general consensus is that to have a practically useful quantum computer we'd need one with about a million physical Qubits. That's not just 1,000 of these 105 qubit chips because those wouldn't be entangled, but one chip with about a million entangled physical qubits and therefore 1,000 logical qubits.
I'll keep this short.
- Google’s Willow quantum chip significantly outpaces current supercomputers, solving tasks in minutes that would otherwise take billions of years.
- Hypothesis: Accelerating advancements in tech and AI could lead to quantum supremacy arriving sooner than the 2030s, contrary to expert predictions.
- Legacy banking systems, being centralized, could transition faster to post-quantum-safe encryption by freezing transfers, re-checking processes, and migrating to new protocols in a controlled manner.
- Decentralized cryptocurrencies face bigger challenges:Hard forks are difficult to coordinate across a decentralized network.
- Transitioning to quantum-safe algorithms could lead to longer transaction signatures and significantly higher fees, eroding trust in the system.
- If quantum computers compromise current cryptography, tangible assets (e.g., real estate, stock indices) may retain more value compared to digital assets like crypto.
Thoughts?