on the crypto
The recent announcement given by Google in one of his blogs, related to the achievement of quantum supremacy, has aroused not only great curiosity, but also a certain uneasiness. A sentiment, the latter, which has affected above all the community that has been moving around digital assets for some time. More than anyone, in fact, he wondered if an event of this kind could represent one real threat to the Bitcoin network. To give an answer to the question they have provided some well-known personalities, starting from Vitalik Butherin.
What Vitalik Buterin said
According to the now famous creator of Ethereum, Google's announcement will not have the slightest impact on cryptocurrencies. According to him, in fact, Google's device would be as real a quantum computer as a hydrogen bomb is to nuclear fusion. In practice it would only show that the phenomenon exists, but we are still very far from its actual application.
A judgment of the rest shared by Andreas Antonopoulos, a well-known expert on cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, according to which cryptocurrencies have absolutely nothing to fear from the latest progress made by Google in the field of quantum computing. In this case, the motivation would lie in the observation that the results achieved would ultimately serve only to indicate the practical applicability of quantum computers to solving a certain class of problems, which however are different from those that need to be solved in order to be able to break the cryptographic algorithms.
Why was the alarm born?
The alarm born among the advocates of digital currencies is due to the fact that in theory, quantum computers could enormously accelerate the resolution of complex calculations at the base of Proof-of-Work networks, including precisely that of Bitcoin, ultimately compromising its security.
In addition to Buterin and Antonopoulos, on this occasion she also felt another discordant voice, that of Scott aaronson, a quantum theorist from the University of Texas, who said that Google's quantum computer should be seen as one opportunity. The reason for his statement lies in the fact that it is able to generate really random numbers, going in this way to bring significant benefits to the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consent mechanisms.
The prerogatives of Sycamore
Sycamore, this is the name of Google's quantum technology prototype, it managed to run in a few seconds a calculation that the current most powerful computer in the world, the Summit produced by IBM, would run in ten thousand years.
Google used to get this incredible result a system from 53 qubit. Qubit means the quantum counterpart of the current bit. Its diversity lies in the fact that if in the classical binary programming the bit can have only two values, zero and one, in the case of quantum computers the qubit can have these two superposed values, or be either zero or one, or even can succeed in be all other intermediate values at the same time. From this characteristic derives the enormous power of calculation of what in many indicate as the new generation of computers.
