41–50 of 118 posts
This site is almost impossible to read on mobile unless you have good vision. Normally I can just hit the button in my phone browser to read it in reader mode, but this site doesn’t support that either. It’s a shame. I am surprised that in 2026 more websites don’t seem so concerned about responsive design, especially when the goal is to read the content.
I worked at a quantum computing company that builds superconducting QC chips (so, not really applicable to one of the “bombshells” from the article). My team was designing the software stack which allows to control the QC, run quantum jobs/algorithms, and calibrate the parameters. I’ve made two attempts to explain the work we’ve been doing and to explain the current realistic state of the industry: 1. A talk at PyCon…
One thing I find rather amazing about all of this is the degree to which the Bitcoin community has tried, for years, to claim that quantum computers will be another other than a complete break. Sure, it takes a pretty nice quantum computer or a pretty good algorithm or a degree of malice on the part of miners to break pay-to-script-hash if your wallet has the right properties, but that seems like a pretty weak excuse…
If Bitcoin is broken then your bank encryption and everything else is broken also. As far as I know quantum computers still can't even honestly factor 7x3=21, so you are good. And the 5x3=15 is iffy about how honest that was either. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45082587 Bitcoin uses 256-bit encryption, it's a universe away from 5x3=15.
Bitcoin doesn't use 256 bit encryption, unless you mean 256-bit hashing. The cryptographic algorithms that are mostly under quantum threat are asymmetric, e.g. digital signatures.
Here's hoping that my stock for D-Wave ends up being worth something. Quantum computing seems super cool, but I've been a little skeptical of it actually ever yielding anything useful. I would love to be wrong, it seems neat, and I have read through a few books on the subject and played with simulators, so I'm not completely talking out of my ass here, but quantum as a whole has kind of felt like vaporware to me. As…
I got some too. Obviously the principles behind quantum computing are perfectly sound. It's just those pesky engineering obstacles. One of the companies around today or in the near future will be the one who makes it work at a practical scale. It will have enormous impact, but I think it will be a slow-burn kind of thing as making effective use of quantum computers will take a long time to evolve, IMHO. Unfortunately…
One thing I find rather amazing about all of this is the degree to which the Bitcoin community has tried, for years, to claim that quantum computers will be another other than a complete break. Sure, it takes a pretty nice quantum computer or a pretty good algorithm or a degree of malice on the part of miners to break pay-to-script-hash if your wallet has the right properties, but that seems like a pretty weak excuse…
Call me crazy, but I think if bitcoin is ever broken they're more likely to move to a centralized ledger than a more secure decentralized ledger. Roughly nobody invested in bitcoin cares about the original mission, they just care about their asset prices.
One thing I find rather amazing about all of this is the degree to which the Bitcoin community has tried, for years, to claim that quantum computers will be another other than a complete break. Sure, it takes a pretty nice quantum computer or a pretty good algorithm or a degree of malice on the part of miners to break pay-to-script-hash if your wallet has the right properties, but that seems like a pretty weak excuse…
If Bitcoin is broken then your bank encryption and everything else is broken also. As far as I know quantum computers still can't even honestly factor 7x3=21, so you are good. And the 5x3=15 is iffy about how honest that was either. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45082587 Bitcoin uses 256-bit encryption, it's a universe away from 5x3=15.
Its a lot easier for your bank to change encryption methods than it is for bitcoin. Presumably you mean TLS here (where else do banks use encryption? Disk encryption?). People are already deploying experiments with quantum-proof TLS.
> As far as I know quantum computers still can't even honestly factor 7x3=21, so you are good. And the 5x3=15 is iffy about how honest that was either.
This is probably the wrong way to look at it. Once you start multiplying numbers together (for real, using error corrected qubits), you are already like 85% there. Like if this was a marathon, the multiplying thing is like a km from the finish line. By the time you start seeing people there the race would already be mostly over.
One thing I find rather amazing about all of this is the degree to which the Bitcoin community has tried, for years, to claim that quantum computers will be another other than a complete break. Sure, it takes a pretty nice quantum computer or a pretty good algorithm or a degree of malice on the part of miners to break pay-to-script-hash if your wallet has the right properties, but that seems like a pretty weak excuse…
If Bitcoin is broken then your bank encryption and everything else is broken also. As far as I know quantum computers still can't even honestly factor 7x3=21, so you are good. And the 5x3=15 is iffy about how honest that was either. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45082587 Bitcoin uses 256-bit encryption, it's a universe away from 5x3=15.
2) "256-bit encryption" has different meanings in different contexts. "256-bit security" generally refers to cryptosystem for which an attack takes roughly 2^256 operations. this is true for AES-256 (symmetric encryption) assuming classical adversaries. this is not true for elliptic curve-based algorithms even though the standard curves are "256-bit curves", but that refers to the size of the group and consequently to the size of the private key. the best general attacks use Pollard's rho algorithm which takes roughly 2^128 operations, i.e., 256-bit curves have 128-bit security.
in the context of quantum attackers, AES-256 is still fine although theoretically QCs halve the security; however its not that big of a deal in practice and ultimately AES-128 is still fine, because doing 2^64 "quantum operations" is presumed to be difficult to do in practice due to parallelization issues etc.
the elliptic curve signatures (used in Bitcoin) are attacked using Shor's algorithm where the big deal is that it is asymptotically polynomial (about O(n^3)) meaning that factoring a 256-bit number is only 256^3/4^3 = 262144x more difficult compared to factoring 15. this is a big difference from "standard" exponential complexity where the difficulty increases exponentially by factors of 2^n. (+ lets ignore that elliptic curve signatures dont rely on factoring but the problem is essentially the same because Shor does both because those are hidden subgroup problems)
the analysis is more complex but most of it is essentially in that paper and explains it nicely.