5 ms·
Why wait? Just go read the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09526-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09526-6 In the last sentence
by lisper 1y ago
Why wait? Just go read the paper:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09526-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09526-6
In the last sentence of the abstract you will find:
"These results ... indicate a viable path to practical quantum advantage."
And in the conclusions:
"Although the random circuits used in the dynamic learning demonstration remain a toy model for Hamiltonians that are of practical relevance, the scheme is readily applicable to real physical systems."
So the press release is a little over-hyped. But this is real progress nonetheless (assuming the results actually hold up).
[UPDATE] It should be noted that this is still a very long way away from cracking RSA. That requires quantum error correction, which this work doesn't address at all. This work is in a completely different regime of quantum computing, looking for practical applications that use a quantum computer to simulate a physical quantum system faster than a classical computer can. The hardware improvements that produced progress in this area might be applicable to QEC some day, this is not direct progress towards implementing Shor's algorithm at all. So your crypto is still safe for the time being.
- ransom1538 1y agoSO... BTC goes to zero?
- deliriumchn 1y agono, not really, PQC is already being discussed in pretty much every relevant crypto thing for couple years alearady and there are multiple PQC algos ready to protect important data in banking etc as well
- cyberpunk 1y agoI don’t really understand the threat to banking. Let’s say you crack the encryption key used in my bank between a java payment processing system and a database server. You can’t just inject transactions or something. Is the threat that internal network traffic could be read? Transactions all go to clearing houses anyway. Is it to protect browser->webapp style banking? those all use ec by now anyway, and even if they don’t how do you mitm this traffic? Where is the exact threat?
- conradev 1y agoThe big threat is passively breaking TLS, so it’s browser traffic. Or, any internet traffic?
- cyberpunk 1y agoOkay, but breaking that TLS (device->bank) would allow you to intercept the session keys and then decrypt the conversation. Alright, so now you can read I logged in and booked a transaction to my landlord or whatever. What else can you do? OTP/2FA code prevents you from re-using my credentials. Has it been demonstrated at all that someone who intercepts a session key is able to somehow inject into a conversation? It seems highly unlikely to me with TCP over the internet. So we are all in a collective flap that someone can see my bank transactions? These are pretty much public knowledge to governments/central banks/clearing houses anyway -- doesn't seem like all that big a deal to me. (I work on payment processing systems for a large bank)
- bawolff 1y ago> Has it been demonstrated at all that someone who intercepts a session key is able to somehow inject into a conversation? It seems highly unlikely to me with TCP over the internet. if you can read the TLS session in general, you can capture the TLS session ticket and then use that to make a subsequent connection. This is easier as you dont have to be injecting packets live or make inconvinent packets disappear.
- cyberpunk 1y agoIt seems like detecting a re-use like this should be reasonably easy, it would not look like normal traffic and we could flag this to our surveillance systems for additional checks on these transactions. In a post quantum world, this seems like something that would be everywhere anyway (and presumably, we would be using some other algo by then too). Somehow, I'm not all that scared. Perhaps I'm naive.. :}
- 1y ago
- pclmulqdq 1y agoNo, we're still not much closer to that event.
- LarsDu88 1y agoIf quantum computers crack digital crytography, traditional bank account goes to zero too because regular 'ol databases also use crytography techniques for communication.
- wcoenen 1y agoIf all else fails, banks can generate terabytes of random one-time pad bytes, and then physically transport those on tape to other banks to set up provably secure communication channels that still go over the internet. It would be a pain to manage but it would be safe from quantum computing.
- SAI_Peregrinus 1y agoThey could also use pre-shared keys with symmetric cryptography. AES-256-GCM is secure against quantum attack, no need to bother with one-time pads.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 1y agoLet's say I give you a function you can call to crack any RSA key. How are you hacking banks?
- r33b33 1y agoThis is WRONG and a very common stupid belief. Traditional banks will just transfer easily to safer encryption, since they are centralised. Bitcoin won't. Bitcoin will die and world will undergo infinite suffering.
- bilsbie 1y agoI don’t see why bitcoin wouldn’t update its software in such a case. The majority of minors just need to agree. But why wouldn’t they if the alternative is going to zero?
- jonathanlydall 1y agoSir Alexander Dane: MINERS, not MINORS.
- FergusArgyll 1y agoThat actually confused me. I thought he he meant "the majority of the minority" while I was pretty sure it's just a simple majority
- jacquesm 1y ago"Ahhhh... now you tell me" (Formerly Prince Andrew, at some point).
- andrewstuart2 1y agoI'll tell you right now, no way my kids would agree until they're at least adults. They don't even know what asymmetric cryptography is.
- LPisGood 1y agoI’m confused, are your kids major Bitcoin miners?
- andrewstuart2 1y agoNot major miners, but minor miners (if you count Minecraft).
- jdiff 1y agoGGP used the term "minors," GP is running with the typo.
- 1y ago
- logtrees 1y agoNo, I don't think so. By the time quantum supremacy is really achieved for a "Q-Day" that could affect them or things like them, the existing blockchains which have already been getting hardened will have gotten even harder. Quantum computing could be used to further harden them, as well, rather than compromise them. Supposing that Q-Day brought any temporary hurdles to Bitcoin or Ethereum or related blockchains, well...due to their underlying nature resulting in justified Permanence, we would be able to simply reconstitute and redeploy them for their functionalities because they've already been sufficiently imbued with value and institutional interest as well. These are quantum-resistant hardenings. So I do not think these tools or economic substrate layers are going anywhere. They are very valuable for the particular kinds of applications that can be built with them and also as additional productive layers to the credit and liquidity markets nationally, internationally, and also globally/universally. So there is a lot of institutional interest, including governance interest, in using them to build better systems. Bitcoin on its own would be reduced in such justification but because of Ethereum's function as an engine which can drive utility, the two together are a formidable and quantum-resistant platform that can scale into the hundreds of trillions of dollars and in Ethereum's case...certainly beyond $1Q in time. I'm very bullish on the underlying technology, even beyond tokenomics for any particular project. The underlying technologies are powerful protocols that facilitate the development and deployment of Non Zero Sum systems at scale. With Q-Day not expected until end of 2020s or beginning of 2030s, that is a considerable amount of time (in the tech world) to lay the ground work for further hardening and discussions around this.
- tux3 1y agoQuantum advantage papers have a history of overpromising, this one looks interesting, but it would still seem wise to wait for a second opinion.
- AndrewStephens 1y ago> "These results ... indicate a viable path to practical quantum advantage" I'll add this to my list of useful phrases. Q: Hey AndrewStephens, you promised that task would be completed two days ago. Can you finish it today? A: Results indicate a viable path to success.
- iwontberude 1y agoCharlie Brown, Lucy, football
- keeda 1y agoAn MBA, an engineer and a quantum computing physicist check into a hotel. Middle of the night, a small fire starts up on their floor. The MBA wakes up, sees the fire, sees a fire extinguisher in the corner of the room, empties the fire extinguisher to put out the fire, then goes back to sleep. The engineer wakes up, sees the fire, sees the fire extinguisher, estimates the extent of the fire, determines the exact amount of foam required to put it out including a reasonable tolerance, and dispenses exactly that amount to put out the fire, and then satisified that there is enough left in case of another fire, goes back to sleep. The quantum computing physicist wakes up, sees the fire, observes the fire extinguisher, determines that there is a viable path to practical fire extinguishment, and goes back to sleep.
- foota 1y agoMeanwhile Schrodinger's cat sleeps peacefully in their carrier.
- adonovan 1y agoNot quite sure why all the responses here are so cynical. I mean, it's a genuinely difficult set of problems, so of course the first steps will be small. Today's computers are the result of 80 astonishing years of sustained innovation by millions of brilliant people. Even as a Googler I can find plenty of reasons to be cynical about Google (many involving AI), but the quantum computing research lab is not one of them. It's actual scientific research, funded (I assume) mostly out of advertising dollars, and it's not building something socially problematic. So why all the grief?
- toasted-subs 1y agoA consistent theme of Quantum Computing is setting up the problem to have the hardwired achieve nicely to get a good news article to get more funding. Im pretty reluctant to make any negative comments about these kinds of posts be cause it will prevent actually achieving the desired outcome.
- bawolff 1y agoQuantum computing hardware is still at its infancy. The problem is not with these papers (or at least not ones like this one) but how they are reported. If quantum computing is going to suceed it needs to do the baby steps before it can do the big steps, and at the current rate the big leaps are probably decades away. There is nothing wrong with that, its a hard problem and its going to take time. But then the press comes in and reports that quantum computing is going to run a marathon tomorrow which is obviously not true and confuses everyone.
- toasted-subs 1y agoThere in lies the problem. Hey can I have a few billion dollars for my baby doesn't really work out too well for investors or industry. The current situation with "AI" took off because people learned their lessons from the last round of funding cuts "AI winter". That being said any pushback against funding quantum research would be like chopped your own hands off.