Bitcoin Forum

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/136614-researchers-create-single-atom-silicon-based-quantum-computer

Death of Bitcoin?

Imminent.

No.  Quantum computing is being demonstrated on a microscopic scale in a lab environment.

It won't be productized for years, maybe even decades.

Our Minirig QC is right around the corner.  No, really...

from the article, it just sounds like an incredible small on/off-switch.

That is in essence exactly what it is. Only it can be "on", "off" and "Aaaah, i don't know, I'm kinda..... you know what, ask me later"

"It is now quite reasonable to believe that there will be readily available, commercial quantum computers in the next few years."

I've read that sentence before. Quite a lot actually. Only it was about flying cars, cancer vaccine, a process to stop aging, artificial intelligence on a human level, bases on the moon and world peace.

Excellent. A quantum based crypto-currency would be even better.

Hook, line, sinker...

No, it is quantum.  It is an on/off/maybe switch.

So?  There are already quantum-resistant encryption schemes available.  What's to stop the Bitcoin community from switching over?

Are you taking pre-orders yet? ;)

Yes, we'll start shipping in a indeterminate amount of time.  It's kind of fuzzy.  Actually, we are shipping now and have shipped in the past and are currently shipping in the future.  All orders have already been shipped, but they are still waiting to be shipped.

Shhhhh, keep it down.  I'm with the NSA and we're trying to spread misinformation in public message boards to hide that we're had QC for the last 5 years.

Maybe because those are impractical (too work intensive) to use with regular machines? (I dont know the answer)

The troublesome time would not be BEFORE or AFTER the transition to QC resistant codes, but the period of transition! Imagine there is a growing fraction of QC compliant codes that cannot be processed in regular machines and on the other hand an abundance of regular encrypted files that fall prey to QC applicators. IDK, is it possible to use QC encryption methods that can also be verified (like hash sums) in regular machines, where the verification of a valid hash sum only takes a fraction of creating the hash?
In that way encryptions would be easy to generate with QC and still verifyable with regular computers.

Hold on folks....

"Quantum computer" -- mostly we're falling for an equivocation here...

Just because it is labeled a "computer" by the scientists doesn't mean it is in any way, even remotely comparable to anything we know as computers. To elaborate on that, let's assume some clever guy has just invented the flip-flop. Does this place him in any way, even remotely close to the goal of having a general purpose PC? Of course not, since there are a gazillion additional things which need to be invented, to bring you from a flip-flop to a PC as we know it today. And a lot of these things (like e.g. the v.Neumann architecture) could be done in a quite different fashion. Which would yield something quite different than what we know as a "computer" today.

All those scientists know today, is the fact that using some quantum mechanical processes plus a certain kind of mathematic approach, it is possible to treat a very specific kind of mathematical problems in a way vastly more efficient than by just doing a numerical calculation to solve those problems "algorithmically" (that is, in the way our present computers can be used to solve problems).

Incidentally, did you know that you don't even need quantum mechanical processes? With a somewhat related, but different approach, you can use a probe with DNA to solve some special simulation problems, which are also quite hard to solve in a conventional, algorithmic way. Just "quantum computers" have such a nice Sci-fi appeal, and thus the press mostly concentrates on "spectacular" news on quantum computing.

The quantum computer both exists and doesn't

Reading the article this sounds more like a quantum scale Turing computer building block rather than an actual quantum computer building block. I mean they were only able to achieve two states, 0 and 1. Or did I misunderstand something?

If you calculate exactly how unlikely it is for a quantum computer to exist, it will spontaneously appear (and start mining qubitcoins)!

Or at least that's what I heard from a guy on btce chat...

It's rather "Successfully interfacing a qubit using regular ASICs" :)
Not much of quantum computing yet..

The power of qbits is when they interact with each others, IMO reading a single qbit with a regular transistor is similar to reading 4 bit from a NAND cell.

They've had single qubit quantum "computers" for a decade. The trick is scaling it up to the necessary number of qubits to make it useful.

What's new here is that the quantum behaviour has been implanted into a silicon transistor.

No.
Lots of threads on this. Here's a recent one: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=105756.0