Hopefully someone much more familiar with quantum computing than I will be able to provide the best answer but I suspect the answer is yes, security as we know will be fundamentally changed. Quantum computing breaks the Moores Law @hilarski mentioned above by immediately going to an almost infinite speed where all machine instructions are executed in a parallel pipeline in virtually zero time. So, if using today’s super computers would take millions of years (some people calculate many billions) to break the security of bitcoin, then a quantum computer could do it in a few seconds….providing there’s a quantum computer, that it has a programming language that works, that memory has been invented that can process that fast, and that the channel architecture of the computer has a fast enough bus….
Some of them will be quantum-resistant. Quantum computers still have problems they’re slow at, it’s still possible to do public key cryptography in a way that’s safe from them.
That said, I wouldn’t worry about crypto-currencies. If somebody can actually build a scalable quantum computer, they could probably set off nukes and stuff - they could make the world end, from that perspective your Bitcoin getting stolen just isn’t a big deal.
Not necessarily. What you may see is a shift to the Tangle instead of the Blockchain
The biggest short term change I see in crypto from quantum computing is in the mining process and the biggest long term change I see is the underlying technology, (which also affects mining.)
Currently quantum computing is in its infancy and early examples like D Wave are not currently better than traditional computing. In a blockchain, blocks are mined by computers racing to solve extremely complex mathematical problems and earn the rewards. In theory, these problems can be solved much faster by quantum computers because qbits can exist in superpositions and are not confined by the traditional definite states (1 or 0.) This means quantum computers can mine bitcoins much faster than regular computers.
To add to what you have said.
Cryptocurrencies right now use the blockchain as the distributed ledger on which all transactions are recorded. Traditional computers find it very difficult to break crypto security, but quantum computers (for the reason explained above) would be able to crack the encryption used for private keys. This makes them vulnerable to quantum computer attacks. This is why blockchains will eventually become obsolete and will be replaced by The Tangle, a new platform for cryptocurrency, that eliminates mining. It is also quantum-resistant. The first example of this is IOTA.
Hopefully someone much more familiar with quantum computing than I will be able to provide the best answer but I suspect the answer is yes, security as we know will be fundamentally changed. Quantum computing breaks the Moores Law @hilarski mentioned above by immediately going to an almost infinite speed where all machine instructions are executed in a parallel pipeline in virtually zero time. So, if using today’s super computers would take millions of years (some people calculate many billions) to break the security of bitcoin, then a quantum computer could do it in a few seconds….providing there’s a quantum computer, that it has a programming language that works, that memory has been invented that can process that fast, and that the channel architecture of the computer has a fast enough bus….
Some of them will be quantum-resistant. Quantum computers still have problems they’re slow at, it’s still possible to do public key cryptography in a way that’s safe from them.
That said, I wouldn’t worry about crypto-currencies. If somebody can actually build a scalable quantum computer, they could probably set off nukes and stuff - they could make the world end, from that perspective your Bitcoin getting stolen just isn’t a big deal.
Not necessarily. What you may see is a shift to the Tangle instead of the Blockchain
The biggest short term change I see in crypto from quantum computing is in the mining process and the biggest long term change I see is the underlying technology, (which also affects mining.)
Currently quantum computing is in its infancy and early examples like D Wave are not currently better than traditional computing. In a blockchain, blocks are mined by computers racing to solve extremely complex mathematical problems and earn the rewards. In theory, these problems can be solved much faster by quantum computers because qbits can exist in superpositions and are not confined by the traditional definite states (1 or 0.) This means quantum computers can mine bitcoins much faster than regular computers.
To add to what you have said.
Cryptocurrencies right now use the blockchain as the distributed ledger on which all transactions are recorded. Traditional computers find it very difficult to break crypto security, but quantum computers (for the reason explained above) would be able to crack the encryption used for private keys. This makes them vulnerable to quantum computer attacks. This is why blockchains will eventually become obsolete and will be replaced by The Tangle, a new platform for cryptocurrency, that eliminates mining. It is also quantum-resistant. The first example of this is IOTA.