The problem is that they don't actually. Printing is usually mechanism that is leading to destabilisation of any given fiat, most central banks have in their status, that they will protect stability of a coin they govern. Law usually is set this way, so that central simply cant print in to oblivion.

The thing that they do is much, much worse. They borrow. Borrow from each other at the expense of future generations. Effect is of course exactly the same, just like you described but stable, slow and semi-predicable.
Politics of acceptance for the inflation is based on a false premise, they (the bankers of today) where taught for their entire schooling, that deflationary currency is bad for the macroeconomy. 100 years ago, nobody was aware of services driven economics. It was all about industry but times has changed. Today we spend most on services not physical goods and that's why deflation proves itself quite useful because people are addicted to those services. They cant imagine life without them, so they pay despite their money gaining in value, system spins the same way, if not faster. Bitcoin proves this.
In my opinion crypto will retain it's position as safe-haven during the upcoming crisis, it will be the best store of value.  

Lol!! Without going to the controversy whether Google has achieved quantum process of 53 Qubit power or not, I think there is no correlation at all! Quantum computer will have much larger scope for mankind, why would it be used to break the encryption of bitcoin only?? That's dumb thinking!

People have always tried to link news articles or other events to price drops/increases. It's something people will continue to do because they have no clue about how the charts have turned bearish af in the last couple of weeks with every touch that confirmed the bearish triangular formation. Statistically, the probability of them breaking out to the downside is 75ish%.

If you also look at the extremely low volumes, which is another solid indicator that a huge move is near, mainly because of how the range has been tightening (tigher range = less volatility = less volume), the market was due for a big move. Unfortunately for people, it went down instead of up, but it shouldn't have come as a surprise. Lower levels are due. DCA the market down is the way to go if you want to grow your stack.

#1 I was referring to quantum proof public keys, which are already ready today but have a few issues:


#2 Again, there's a study saying that current ASICs are faster than theoretical quantum computers when it comes to mining because they're specialized:


So if this is accurate, Bitcoin doesn't really have to worry too much about getting 51%'d by quantum computers, or at least  not in the near future.

#3 Yeah, all I was saying is that I don't think a lot mainstream readers would be able to draw that connection, which is why I believe that it's unlikely for the price slide to be attributable to the news piece.

#1 Not really. A new public key algorithm could be introduced with a simple soft fork

#2 current ASICs are faster (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/09/quantum_computers_could_crack_bitcoin/) than projected quantum computer clock speeds.

I'm not sure mainstream readers would actually know that there could be a connection between quantum computers and Bitcoin unless it's explicitly mentioned in the article (and articles I've seen don't).

i agree, it is a matter of technical, there was a sideways trading last days, margin were low, and stop loss triggering enforced decrease, since there was a tone of them within low margin from last week stable price, and that was the main reason for the dip to go this down, we will see how this is going to play further

here is a link to support this opinion
https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoins-price-slides-1000-in-30-minutes-after-margin-calls-at-bitmex

A trader, who wished to remain anonymous, said the price drop may have been exacerbated by margin calls and contract liquidations on Bitmex

Hello Hydrogen, i don't think google's quantum computer is behind this price drop. I know it looks like a panic move but if quantum computer break bitcoin we can recover it with an update and a hardfork.

#1 Google did not say anything like that in the second part of your phrase.

#2 No fake news and speculation. And nowhere in the crypto-forums this news was presented so much, but to those singles asked about effect on crypto, they clearly explained that this was not connected with crypto. At least not in the coming years. I did not see any significant interest in this news. Talked a bit and forgot.

#3 And this has nothing to do with the fall.

The piece of news from google was a couple days ago, there's no connection between that and todays 'dip'. The price was going sideways for too long, expectations for Bakkt were too high, and we're seeing a large decrease in price following weeks of stability. We might go back to ~$10k but it may 'dip' again.

"While our (quantum) processor takes about 200 seconds to sample one instance of the quantum circuit 1 million times, a state-of-the-art supercomputer would require approximately 10,000 years to perform the equivalent task," the researchers said.

Google's quantum computer, dubbed "Sycamore," contained 53-qubits, or "quantum bits," a measure of the machine's potential power. The team scaled back from a 72-qubit device, dubbed "Bristlecone," it had previously designed.

The researchers estimate that performing the same experiment on a Google Cloud server would take 50 trillion hours—too long to be feasible. On the quantum processor, it took only 30 seconds, they said.

Google Claims ‘Quantum Supremacy,’ Marking a Major Milestone in Computing

In what may be a huge milestone in computing, Google says it has achieved "quantum supremacy," an experimental demonstration of the superiority of a quantum computer over a traditional one.

The claim, made in a new scientific paper, is the most serious indication yet that the promise of quantum computers—an emerging but unproven type of machine—is becoming reality, including their potential to solve formerly ungraspable mathematical problems.

Essentially, Google purports to have pulled off a stunt on a quantum computer that no classical machine—not even the world's most powerful supercomputer—can replicate.

Fortune obtained a copy of Google's paper, which was posted to NASA.gov earlier this week before being taken down. The Financial Times first reported the news.

A Google spokesperson declined to confirm the authenticity of the paper and its results. NASA did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

A source at Google familiar with the situation suggested, however, that NASA accidentally published the paper early, before its team's claims could be thoroughly vetted through scientific peer review, a process that could take anywhere from weeks to months.

If the paper holds up under the scrutiny of the scientific community, it will herald a watershed moment in quantum science. Its central claim counters doubt that some unforeseen law of nature may prevent quantum computers from operating as hoped.

"Quantum speedup is achievable in a real-world system and is not precluded by any hidden physical laws," the Google researchers write.

Further, they predict that quantum computing power will "grow at a double exponential rate," besting even the exponential rate that defined Moore's Law, a trend that observed traditional computing power to double roughly every two years.

The experiment

The experiment described in the paper sampled randomly generated numbers produced through a specialized scenario involving quantum phenomena. The researchers said they determined that their quantum computer beat regular computers at the task, which involved calculating the output of certain specialized circuits.

"While our processor takes about 200 seconds to sample one instance of the quantum circuit 1 million times, a state-of-the-art supercomputer would require approximately 10,000 years to perform the equivalent task," the researchers said.

Google's quantum computer, dubbed "Sycamore," contained 53-qubits, or "quantum bits," a measure of the machine's potential power. The team scaled back from a 72-qubit device, dubbed "Bristlecone," it had previously designed.

The researchers estimate that performing the same experiment on a Google Cloud server would take 50 trillion hours—too long to be feasible. On the quantum processor, it took only 30 seconds, they said.

"Quantum processors based on superconducting qubits can now perform computations...beyond the reach of the fastest classical supercomputers available today," the researchers write. "To our knowledge, this experiment marks the first computation that can only be performed on a quantum processor."

Outlook

Businesses are hoping the advancement of quantum computers—by tech giants such as Google, IBM, and Intel, as well as startups such as Rigetti Computing—will lead to unprecedented scientific and technical breakthroughs in the coming years. They're eyeing applications from new chemical reactions for the development of drugs, fertilizers, and batteries, to the improvement of optimization algorithms and mathematical modeling.

As exciting as Google's result is, other researchers caution against overhyping it, fearing that inflated expectations of imminent advances will lead to a popped bubble.

Dario Gil, head of IBM Research, advises against using quantum supremacy as a metric with which to measure progress in the field. "The experiment and the 'supremacy' term will be misunderstood by nearly all," he told Fortune.

Gil described the experiment as a highly special case "laboratory experiment" that has "no practical applications." He added, "Quantum computers will never reign 'supreme' over classical computers, but will rather work in concert with them, since each have their unique strengths."

Jim Clarke, Intel Labs' director of quantum hardware, called Google's update "a notable mile marker." He said that "a commercially viable quantum computer will require" many R&D advancements before becoming a reality.

"While development is still at mile one of this marathon, we strongly believe in the potential of this technology," Clarke added.

The Google team, which first wrote about their goal in a Nature article two years ago, appears to be more hopeful about the short-term prospects of its findings. "As a result of these developments, quantum computing is transitioning from a research topic to a technology that unlocks new computational capabilities," the researchers write.

"We are only one creative algorithm away from valuable near-term applications."

https://fortune.com/2019/09/20/google-claims-quantum-supremacy/

This is a beautiful project but how will you going to identify those people that they will not pretend innocent about Bitcoin?

How much free bitcoin you've been giving out to each individual?

Out of all possible options at the time, why did he go for sha256 given its ties to NIST/NSA?

US attorney general William Barr says Americans should accept security risks of encryption backdoors

U.S. attorney general William Barr has said consumers should accept the risks that encryption backdoors pose to their personal cybersecurity to ensure law enforcement can access encrypted communications.

In a speech Tuesday in New York, the U.S. attorney general parroted much of the same rhetoric from his predecessors and other senior staff at the Justice Department, calling on tech companies to do more to assist federal authorities to gain access to devices with a lawful order.

Encrypted messaging has taken off in recent years, making its way to Apple products, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, a response from Silicon Valley to the abuse of access by the intelligence services in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations in 2013. But law enforcement says encryption thwarts their access to communications they claim they need to prosecute criminals.

The government calls this “going dark” because they cannot see into encrypted communications, and it remains a key talking point by the authorities. Critics — including lawmakers — and security experts have long said there is no secure way to create “backdoor” access to encrypted communications for law enforcement without potentially allowing malicious hackers to also gain access to people’s private communications.

In remarks, Barr said the “significance of the risk should be assessed based on its practical effect on consumer cybersecurity, as well as its relation to the net risks that offering the product poses for society.”

He suggested that the “residual risk of vulnerability resulting from incorporating a lawful access mechanism is materially greater than those already in the unmodified product.”

“Some argue that, to achieve at best a slight incremental improvement in security, it is worth imposing a massive cost on society in the form of degraded safety,” he said.

The risk, he said, was acceptable because “we are talking about consumer products and services such as messaging, smart phones, e-mail, and voice and data applications,” and “not talking about protecting the nation’s nuclear launch codes.”

The attorney general said it was “untenable” that devices offer uncrackable encryption while offering zero access to law enforcement.

Barr is the latest in a stream of attorneys general to decry an inability by law enforcement to access encrypted communications, despite pushback from the tech companies.

In a rebuttal, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said the attorney general’s remarks were “outrageous, wrongheaded and dangerous.”

“If we give this attorney general and this president the unprecedented power to break encryption across the board burrow into the most intimate details of every American’s life – they will abuse those powers,” the senator said.

The U.S. is far from alone in calling on tech companies to give law enforcement access.

Earlier this year U.K. authorities proposed a new backdoor mechanism, the so-called “ghost protocol,” which would give law enforcement access to encrypted communications as though they were part of a private conversation. Apple, Google, Microsoft and WhatsApp rejected the proposal.

The FBI inadvertently undermined its “going dark” argument last year when it admitted the number of encrypted devices it claimed it couldn’t gain access to was overestimated by thousands.

FBI director Christopher Wray said the number of devices it couldn’t gain access to was less than a quarter of the claimed 7,800 phones and tablets.

Barr did not rule out pushing legislation to force tech companies to build backdoors.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/23/william-barr-consumers-security-risks-backdoors/

If you are paranoid about the outcome of this US sponsored competition to come up with encryption standards, then you should be paranoid about Bitcoin's SHA256, Tor or anything else that came out of US related activity.

In any case there's no real reason to worry about any of this, quantum computing as it is today it's just a meme. I would stick to SHA256 and plan for a NIST alternative in the future if necessary.. and non-US stuff doesn't necessarily mean safer anyway. It just has to be peer reviewed by as many independent and widespread people as possible.

Satoshi most likely did the right thing at not using something more exotic, it could have backfired, SHA256 was the most widespread with hardware support and timetested, peer-reviewed by cryptographers.

The world’s best cryptographers meet this week to compete in a U.S.-sponsored challenge to create a quantum-resistant standard.

Want to steal some Bitcoin? All you need to do is find your victim’s 16-character public key and calculate their private key by solving something called an “elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem.” No sweat! With a regular computer, that’ll take you around 50 million times the amount of time the universe itself has left—around 0.65 billion billion years.

Ah, but with the right quantum computer, able to process information at speeds exponentially faster than today’s supercomputers? Suddenly, what seems uncrackable becomes child’s play, able to be broken in under 10 minutes.

The quantum-computing problem is nothing new to crypto, and many experts believe we have at least a decade or more to come up with quantum-resistant cryptography. However, some observers say that recent and unexpectedly fast advances are causing the time horizon to dramatically shrink. The most aggressive estimate says that bitcoin will be hackable by 2027, according to Fact Based Insights.

“We moved the state of the art more in the last two years than it has progressed in the last 15 or 20,” says Stewart Allen, Chief Operating Officer at IonQ, a company that claims to make some of the most powerful quantum computers in the world, in an interview with Decrypt.

On Thursday, top cryptographers will meet in Santa Barbara at the University of California for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Post Quantum Cryptography semi finals. The finalists of the NIST competition will be announced in the months after the conference, though it might take years before the winner is annointed. Cryptographers say the standards that result represent blockchain’s best hope for resisting the rapidly encroaching power of quantum computers.

”If someone cracked your key, they could do anything they wanted,” Rob Campbell, President at Baltimore,Maryland-based Med Cybersecurity, told Decrypt. Anyone with sensitive information on the blockchain—cash, personal data, medical records—is at risk. With that sort of information, quantum hackers could “forge your name, take your assets,” and, if there’s medical data to be found, maliciously “triple your dose,” said Campbell. “It’s an open door.”

Take the Bitcoin blockchain: an unencrypted public key is sent along with every bitcoin transaction, and left unencrypted during the time it takes for the network to confirm the block, around ten minutes. That’s theoretically more than enough time for a quantum-equipped hacker to calculate a private key from the public key and replace the recipient’s address with his own.

Que Quantum?  

Transistors in conventional computers capture data in terms of 1s and 0s. Is the sky blue today? If it is, 1. If not, 0. Computing is essentially combinations of these calculations: have enough transistors, you can compute almost anything.

With quantum computers, it’s possible for the same input, called a qubit, to represent both 0 and 1 at the same time, a non-binary state known as “quantum superposition”—think Schrödinger's dead-and-alive cat. This makes quantum computers exponentially more powerful; one lone, superpositioned qubit can handle the processing load of at least two full-sized transistors on a regular computer.

Using modified versions of “Shor’s algorithm,” a quantum algorithm that rapidly turns large numbers into prime factors, hackers could reverse the process that makes private keys so difficult to crack.

But at the moment, the best quantum computer is probably Google's Bristlecone quantum computer, which has 72 qubits. Miruna Rosca, a PhD student in post-quantum cryptography, tells Decrypt you’d probably need around 4000 qubits to break current cryptographic algorithms.

So how long do we have?
IonQ’s Allan, who creates quantum computers for a living, speculates it’ll take about a decade for post-quantum cryptography to become an issue. By then, he reckons, someone will probably have developed a quantum-resistant blockchain. Danny Ryan, a core researcher at Ethereum, thinks the same: “This isn't really a meaningful problem in the next 10 years and likely not for 20 to 30. That said, we tend to be bad at estimating things like this so we should be ready to transition sooner rather than later.”

But others say the problem requires immediate attention, and that—beyond the threat to Bitcoin—quantum computing could pose a major cybersecurity threat. Med Cybersecurity’s Rob Campbell says that a government armed with quantum decryption software could read all the world’s secrets.

A U.S. Navy signal officer by training, Campbell’s time in the classified research and development world has taught him that secret government technologies often outpace commercially available technology. “We were decades ahead of the commercial world,” he said. “We didn’t want any potential adversaries to know what our capabilities are.”

Even if Campbell’s claims seem ambitious, he points out that if an enemy security agency scrape all of your encrypted data today—which they certainly could—they’ll be able to decrypt all that data once they’ve built a powerful enough quantum computer. That’s enough to make developing quantum-resistant cryptographic techniques an issue of national security.

In any case, the arms race for quantum supremacy is well underway: China just spent $10 billion on a research center for quantum computers, and the U.S. has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the field.

Quantum-resistant techniques
Quantum computing can be just as effective for cryptographers as it is for hackers. Unobserved, superpositioned particles exist in multiple states, but when detected, they “collapse” to one point in space-time. Quantum cryptography has the same properties; because the protons that make up an encoded transaction shift upon observation, a successful attacker would have to break the laws of physics to intercept it.

This makes information encoded at the quantum level resistant to, among other things, so-called “man in the middle attacks,” where attackers intercept the transmission itself without having to decrypt the key.

A few blockchains claim to apply quantum-resistant techniques to ensure signatures and hashes remain encrypted, including QRL, IOTA, HyperCash, and Starkware. But with quantum computing still in its formative years, it’s difficult to determine the strength of these claims.

Until a quantum-resistant algorithm is tested and accepted by the wider academic community, there’s no assurance that any of these blockchains will be resilient enough against quantum computers. Scientists like Campbell are waiting on the results of next week’s NIST competition at UCAL-Santa Barbara; the final winners might not be announced for a few years, however. NIST tentatively expects drafts for standardisation will be completed around 2022.

“These winners are considered to be the best candidates on Earth and will likely go on to be standard cryptography and will be used by most of the planet,” says Campbell.

But developing the algorithm might not be the difficult part for large blockchains like Ethereum or Bitcoin. Whereas owners of centralized protocols can update the system as they please, blockchains, democratic by nature, require broad consensus among many thousands of miners to pass an upgrade.

In the case of an upgrade, all wallets that aren’t quantum-resistant become vulnerable to attack. That includes the 1 million bitcoins mined by Bitcoin’s pseudonymous inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto—if those aren’t migrated to a new, quantum-resistant wallet, they’re treasure for the first person with a powerful enough quantum computer.

“If high powered quantum computers appeared tomorrow,” said Ethereum’s Ryan, “we'd have many more problems than just the security of our blockchains.”

A 2019 National Academy of Sciences report concludes that, even if quantum computing is about a decade off, prioritising research is necessary to minimize “the chance of a potential security and privacy disaster.” Best get cracking, then.

https://decrypt.co/8498/bitcoins-race-to-outrun-the-quantum-computer

Scientists like Campbell are waiting on the results of next week’s NIST competition at UCAL-Santa Barbara; the final winners might not be announced for a few years, however. NIST tentatively expects drafts for standardisation will be completed around 2022.

“These winners are considered to be the best candidates on Earth and will likely go on to be standard cryptography and will be used by most of the planet,” says Campbell.