Is Crypto Ready for the New Space Age?

Published on by Cointele | Published on

Quantum supremacy is officially here, whether we're ready for it or not.

With Amazon also getting into the quantum game on a consumer level by launching its own quantum computing service called Braket, allowing developers to run simulations on a "Cloud" of quantum computers from D-Wave, IonQ and Rigetti, 2020 could be an even bigger year for the looming prospect of quantum computing.

Think of the leaps made by mobile computing in the span of a little more than a decade, starting two decades ago, when we went from the PalmOS to iOS. With Moore's Law of exponential processor growth slowing down or stalling permanently, large manufacturers of enterprise and personal computing hardware cannot allow consumers to get out of the habit of the "Upgrade cycle." The growing demands of enterprise and cloud computing almost require a need for quantum computing to evolve into a new market, even if the initial use cases are limited and apply almost exclusively to governments, research institutions and the cloud.

The onus is not just on these large companies but on everyone to start thinking about the foundation of new quantum-secure networks that can leverage quantum entanglement to generate provable random numbers and the next-generation hashing algorithms that will provide secure cryptography for this new computing age.

With the significant impact of quantum computing on artificial intelligence - another important area of prospective research and development for these companies - this will only further stoke the flames of motivation for discovering new quantum breakthroughs.

Today, cryptocurrencies' pseudo-random generation of keys continues to make them susceptible to exploitation by hackers, and quantum computing will only increase the likelihood of predicting software-generated values in the blink of an eye, presenting major security concerns.

As elegant and essentially perfect as Satoshi Nakamoto's protocol is, the creator couldn't account for a world where quantum computing could realistically be applied to compromise proof-of-work before the termination of crypto mining.

With quantum computing executing in seconds what would take millennia for the fastest supercomputers to process, easily taking over more than 50% of Bitcoin's mining hashrate would be one of many tools at a potential attacker's disposal.

The industry therefore needs to work on building quantum security as vigorously, if not more vigorously, than developing quantum itself.

The problems we have seen the internet encounter already this century - large companies holding money above user rights, nation-states holding power above civil rights, and criminals exploiting this flawed architecture - will only continue on through the rest of the century, but on a new quantum field of play.

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