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Short rant about Quantum Computing breaking bitcoin:
1/ If you study even a little of it, you realize very quickly that the engineering challenges are enormous. Most attempts use temperatures a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero, not exactly easy to produce.
1/ If you study even a little of it, you realize very quickly that the engineering challenges are enormous. Most attempts use temperatures a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero, not exactly easy to produce.
2/ What's more, the way quantum works is that you have lots of coherence problems and half-life problems. You need redundancy which adds enormous complexity to the system.
3/ Add to that the best quantum algorithms really only give you a square-root factor speed-up. So if it took 2^256 operations for a brute force attack, congrats, now you need to do 2^128 operations... on a quantum computer.
4/ This is not trivial. Quantum computers are really slow due to the engineering issues. Conventional computers are much, much, faster and can do many orders of magnitude more operations per second because they've been developed to be so for the last 40 years.
5/ For quantum to break anything you need not just a quantum computer, but one that's been refined for another 10 generations to get the speed that a conventional computer has. In addition, you would need enormous numbers of such computers to break encryption we have now.
6/ In other words, quantum fears are way overblown and not only do we not know how to do most of the things required to make a sufficiently complex quantum computer, but they're not nearly the speed they'd need to be to break anything in Bitcoin.
7/ So why do ppl talk about this? Quantum computing is a way to make themselves look smart without having to back it up much. Not many people can call you out on your BS. This is my way of telling you to just stop listening to those people. They are fearmongers. /fin
