Bitcoin Could Herald The Arrival Of Quantum Computers
Bitcoin could be the horn that sounds the arrival of a working quantum computer, albeit in a very unconventional fashion. Alex Beath, a Toronto-based physicist and pension fund analyst claims that the cryptocurrency could detect when someone creates a working quantum computer – by being mined out.
"The second someone creates a viable quantum computer, the NP-complete math problems at the heart of Bitcoin mining tech become instantly solvable," Beath notes in an interview with Fortune. "In other words, one answer to the question 'what's the first thing you'd do with a quantum computer?' is 'mine all of the remaining Bitcoin instantly.' Until that happens, nobody has a quantum computer."
Beath's off-the-cuff observation also underscores a serious problem: the rise of a new era of computing. Once it arrives, the system that created vast cryptocurrency fortunes will also be the one to collapse it.
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This threat to Bitcoin and other software systems that use the same type of encryption is that they are vulnerable to a quantum-based attack. This was predicted years ago and Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin even wrote about how to defend against such attacks.
However, unlike in 2013 when Buterin's report was published, tech companies such as Microsoft, Google, and IBM are making huge breakthroughs in quantum computing. At the rate they are going, it is certainly possible to create a working quantum computer before the last Bitcoin is mined.
Currently, engineers are hindered over how to deploy enough "qubits" in a stable fashion. Qubits are a quantum version of the binary bit system used in traditional computers that lets a unit be a 0 and 1 simultaneously and are a necessary element in quantum computing.
Not to worry though as currently, the number of qubits in a machine has only soared from 16 to 50, a far cry from the 4,000 to 10,000 that would likely be needed to crack the encryption used in Bitcoin. However, this doesn't mean that quantum computers are still years away as technological advances continue to be developed at a staggering rate.
