Thread by @steve_larrison

Quantum Computing - a root thread

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First of all, this is a root thread. It's a term that I just made up to describe what I will be creating over a period of time.

Quantum computing is a very broad topic.

Too broad to be handled adequately in a single thread on a short message platform like Twitter.
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Rather than trying to cover the topic adequately in a single thread, this thread will serve as a root for other threads that I write on the subject.

As new threads are created, they will be linked to the bottom of this thread. So if you find the subject interesting, or you
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simply want to follow my thoughts on the subject, you may want to bookmark this thread so that it is easy to see what gets added.

This thread is intended to serve multiple purposes and hopefully it will be beneficial to different types of readers.

For investors, I want to
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make this thread educational so that investments can be informed investments, rather than simply following what stock is hot today.

Looking at the current market, there are some large players who have a presence in quantum computing, and a small handful of pure play startup
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companies that have either just gone public, or are in the process of going public through the SPAC process.

Among the larger players, $IBM is investing significant resources in the quantum ecosystem. But they are not alone, Google/Alphabet ($GOOG), Honeywell ($HON),
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MicroSoft ($MSFT), Intel ($INTC) and others are working to bring quantum computing from being an interesting concept to being an essential computing platform.

Small pure-play companies that are either already public, or are going through the SPAC process to become public
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include IonQ ($IONQ), Rigetti Computing ($SNII), and Arqit Quantum ($ARQQ).

But we are in the early days of quantum computing. There will be more companies that enter the public markets.

Some of these companies will offer incredible opportunities for the informed investor.
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And, if the past is prologue to the future, other companies entering the market will be scams run by unethical people chasing a fast buck.

One goal of this series of threads that I will be writing is to arm people with enough information so that they can separate the
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legitimate opportunities from the scams.

Also, one thing to keep in mind when you are evaluating opportunities is one of the lessons that Peter Lynch taught everyone in his excellent book "One up on Wall Street" - you have to pay attention to the percentage of sales
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generated by a product to a company to properly evaluate the impact that a technology will have on a company's stock price.

Simply put, a break through processor will have more of an impact on IonQ's stock price than it will on IBM's stock price because quantum computing
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sales have a much larger impact on the top and bottom line of IonQ than they do on IBM.

As part of informing investors on opportunities in quantum computing, I will be adding commentary on the state of the industry and a rough roadmap of what needs to be done to bring
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quantum computing into the mainstream.

This will include the following topics:

Quantum computing vs. classical computing - I don't believe that it is possible to discuss this topic without diving into qubits, superposition, and quantum entanglement - among other things.
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Hareware - unlike classical computers, there isn't a single unified architecture used to build a quantum computer. There are tradeoffs behind various approaches that have an impact on how close these platforms are to becoming viable platforms for production.
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Firmware/Qubit Error Mitigation - this will make more sense as I go deeper into the subject, but for now I will just say that like classical computing, quantum computing stacks are built upon abstraction. If you want to create a viable quantum computing platform, you can't
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expect quantum application developers to deal with low level error correction - especially given the number of different hardware approaches used by quantum computers.

Operating Systems - this may come as a surprise to those of you who may have experimented with IonQ or
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quantum computing platforms through cloud services offered by Amazon, MicroSoft, Google or IBM, but there is no standard operating system for quantum computers.

Your cloud instances may allow you to develop applications using Qiskit, Cirq, Q# or some other quantum specific
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programming language that is hosted on a Linux or a Windows server. But these languages simply allow developers to create applications that are submitted as jobs to a quantum host through a standard API. Everything behind the API is hidden from you.

As quantum computing
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matures, it will be necessary to come up with a standard operating system.

The stage we are at right now with quantum computers is similar to early days of the personal computer when we had OSes like CP/M, MS-DOS, PC-DOS, DR-DOS, Apple DOS and others.
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I firmly believe that the past is prologue to the future, and the quantum industry will learn from the past and coalesce around one or two quantum operating systems.

Quantum Error Correction - even with firmware that supports qubit error manipulation, errors arise from
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improper qubit manipulation and decoherence.

Compilers and interpreters - the goal here is to inform developers where the market is going. But at the same time, investors can gain insight by looking at what languages given platforms support.
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Applications of quantum computers - finally, it should be recognized that quantum computers will make some things that simply aren't possible with classical computers possible, but they aren't the best solution for all problems.

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