EXCLUSIVE: Why Google’s “quantum supremacy” means the end of encryption security for cryptocurrency, military, finance and personal communications
by: Mike Adams
NaturalNews.com
Sunday, September 22, 2019
Over the last 24 hours, Natural News and NewsWars have spearheaded the reporting on the implications of Google’s “quantum supremacy” announcement from Friday. What’s astonishing is how few independent media publishers and mainstream media outlets are covering this story, considering it’s the biggest computing milestone in the history of humanity, with game-changing implications for the future of the human race.
It seems apparent that many people simply don’t want to believe those implications, so they choose to ignore what just happened. On the indy media side, one of the implications that seems to bother many publishers is the fact that quantum computing makes cryptocurrency obsolete. So quantum computing stories get ignored because the implications are too scary for the crypto crowd, which doesn’t feel comfortable considering the implications of what happens when the “crypto” portion of cryptocurrency no longer offers any real security at all.
The “crypto” in “cryptocurrency,” of course, stands for “cryptography.” It is cryptography that allows cryptocurrency transactions to be securely communicated over non-secure networks (such as the open internet) while verifying the authenticity of the party sending cryptocurrency funds. Quantum computing makes classical cryptography obsolete for mathematical reasons explained below.
Cryptography relies on cryptographic asymmetry, which is rendered obsolete by quantum computing
To back up for a minute, cryptography relies on what’s called asymmetry in computational difficulty in terms of encrypting something versus breaking that encryption. For example, it might take your desktop PC 10 seconds to encrypt a file, but breaking that encryption on another desktop PC might take 10 billion years (depending on the number of encryption bits and other factors).
However, quantum computing makes this roughly symmetrical, meaning the difficulty of encrypting a file is roughly symmetrical to the difficulty of breaking the encryption using quantum computing (qubits).
What this means is that even if Bitcoin doubled the number of bits used in its encryption algorithms to 512, quantum computers simply need to increase their qubits to 512 to be able to break all the Bitcoin encryption in about the same amount of time the encryption required (which is almost no time at all).
So you might say why not just make all Bitcoin encryption 1024 bits, or 2048 bits, or 4096? The answer should be obvious. Thanks to quantum computing, you no longer have an asymmetrical computing advantage, meaning that you are adding just as much computing burden to the encryption side as you are to the “breaking encryption” side of the equation. And if you thought Bitcoin was slow and bloated today, just imagine how slow it would become if you start doubling or quadrupling the number of bits needed for every secure communication.
Meanwhile, quantum computing is leaping forward at orders of magnitude that make your head spin. Honestly stated, most people just don’t follow the math and can’t comprehend the reality of how much faster quantum computers are at breaking encryption codes compared to classical computers.
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