A quantum annealer - if it is indeed an annealer, I am only speculating - is still very useful. It is perfect for solving certain types of problems, and doing so exponentially faster than a classical computer. This 1000 qubit annealer could be an important advancement... it's just that it's no threat to asymmetric cryptography.


I think the speed of interaction would always be light speed. The speed of a photon from a normal human perspective is c. As for the speed of a photon from the viewpoint of another photon, well, this is problematic. I don't think we can say that a photon sees another photon moving at c, or at a proportion or c, or even, for two photons travelling in the same direction, that they each see the other as having zero relative velocity. The reason we can't say this, is because the perspective of a thing travelling at c is the limiting case. No time passes for a photon. A photon regarding another photon sees simply a thing, not a thing that moves in time.


I agree with your explanation of a photon, which I have truncated here. Yes, when we say it is 'massless', we are referring to it having zero rest mass. The problem is complicated because we have no proper relativistic theory of quantum mechanics. For QM, a photon is massless. For relativity, a photon has zero rest mass, but does have relativistic mass.
E=mc² expands out to: E² = p²c² + m²_restc⁴, where p = m_relv

But we can't talk about relativity from the perspective of quantum mechanics, because we don't yet have a proper marriage of the two theories.


Boson sampling is one approach:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/quantum-computer-made-from-photons-achieves-a-new-record/

I don't agree with you, but I'm meriting your post because you are interested in a constructive discussion

How about we take the example of poor people blowing all their money on alcohol rather than spending it responsibly? Alcoholism is a severe problem in certain very poor communities. For example, Inuit in Canada, the Native Americans/First Nations in the US, the original settlers of Australia, Maoris in New Zealand... all of these are indigenous peoples in lands colonised by Europeans. Presumably you would never suggest that they are weak/stupid/lazy, you would never ascribe those characteristics as being due to race, and instead agree that the alcohol dependency is a consequence of the situation in which they find themselves? In which case, surely, the bad financial decisions are a consequence of being poor, rather than poverty being a consequence of bad decisions?

I do agree with you that some people are lazy, reckless, and take no responsibility for their actions or their situations... but I don't think we can pretend that our societies are egalitarian, with equal rights and opportunities for all, and that the people at the bottom find themselves there because of their own bad decisions. Imagine if Donald Trump had been born into a penniless family - surely he wouldn't then have managed to become president?

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It doesn't have to be everyone having the exact same amount of money though, does it? That's just taking it to an extreme to make the idea appear absurd and unworkable. It's like people screaming that Obamacare is communism, when it's clearly not.

^{[citation needed]}
This sounds like a baseless accusation and lazy stereotyping.  Of course I am happy to be swayed if you have evidence to support this contention. But as far as I am aware, the available evidence suggests that direct cash transfers to the world's poor is one of the most effective forms of charity. Take the example of Give Directly, which is consistently rated extremely highly by the evaluator Give Well.
https://www.givewell.org/charities/give-directly#Does_it_work
Example study:
https://files.givewell.org/files/DWDA%202009/Interventions/Cash%20Transfers/haushofer_shapiro_uct_2013.11.16.pdf


Agree with the first part, but not the second. There are certainly notable instances of mega-rich individuals giving back hugely to society, the Gates Foundation being perhaps the most visible example. I would argue these are exceptions rather than the rule. We cannot rely on the rich to distribute their own wealth, we cannot rely on them to suddenly alter the values that have driven them to accumulate the wealth in the first place. This is for the same reason that we need laws against cartels and monopolies. It doesn't just police itself. Capitalism is great so long as government has the power to set the limits within which it operates. The best proposed solution I've seen thus far to the entrenched (and ever-growing) inequality is a wealth tax.

Definitely agree. Hamilton has proven himself a great driver. I know it is difficult to determine how much is the car and how much is the driver, but there are plenty of indicators out there. Firstly, how they compare with their team mate. Hamilton is significantly better than Bottas, and was significantly better than Rosberg (that one Rosberg world title was an aberration due in large part to Hamilton's bad luck that season, and I think Rosberg knew he'd never get another shot, which is why he retired straight after). And as you said, McLaren gives us very strong evidence. Alonso is a great driver, and Hamilton in his debut season was able to match him. Another good indicator of driver talent I think is their performance in the wet... and it's impossible to deny that Hamilton is a master here. It's difficult to see beyond Lewis and Max as the best two drivers currently in F1. We need to also consider that the best teams want, and are able to attract, the best drivers. If all contracts were up for renewal at the same time, then every team would want Lewis. You can't say that about most drivers. The best drivers tend to gravitate to the best teams. Take a football example - Messi and Ronaldo don't look good because they play for Barca and Juve, rather they play for those teams because they are top teams and can attract and retain the best players.

I think if we're looking for drivers who are over-rated and achieved success just because of the car, we don't have to look any further than Vettel, who has finally been found out and doesn't have a drive for next year. All that Vettel has really proved in his career is that he's better than Mark Webber.

Gold is a proven safe-haven asset. Bitcoin has the potential to be a safe-haven, but this remains a possible future state.

Yes, the response of crypto prices to the pandemic has been encouraging, but we can't say that bitcoin volatility has suddenly disappeared for good. It remains comparatively low volume when compared to traditional markets, it is of course unregulated, and is still regarded with suspicion and mistrust by most governments. It has the potential to be a safe-haven and the ultimate store-of-value... but at the moment, it is seen much more as a highly speculative asset.

I do agree with you that the signs are encouraging, but I still think we are a long way from that end-state at the moment.

He's a great driver, yes. I think however that today might be unrepresentative of the rest of the season. We had the perfect combintation of factors to give Red Bull a chance. Normally their car is a long way behind the Merc, and no matter how good Max is, his car can't compete.
What we had today were three things:
1) A very hot day.
2) A track that is known for being very very tough on tyres.
3) No hard tyres for the race, Pirelli withdrew them. This week's 'hard' were what last week we called 'medium'.
So these three factors combined to mean that tyre degradation, Mercedes only weakness, was hugely important. It is difficult to see the same thing happening too many times again this season. We need all three factors together really for the Red Bull to have a chance.

I would say very unlikely. Remember the chaos and ill-feeling of the Hamilton/Rosberg years? Hamilton/Bottas works perfectly for the team dynamic, and Mercedes already have the driver's and constructor's championships sewn up. I can't see that they'd bring Max in whilst Hamilton is still there.

I can't find a ton of detail on the proposed ColdQuanta machine, but a couple of things lead me to think this will pose zero threat to cryptography. First is the name Bo Ewald - he is famous as the president of D-Wave, which is a quantum annealer rather than a general purpose QC. Second is the quote below:

_{https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/coldquanta-awarded-contract-7-4m-darpa-cold-atom-quantum-computers/}

The key phrase here is 'combinatorial optimization problems'... which is pretty much a giveaway that we are talking about a quantum annealer.
The way these work is that when the problem is modelled, the annealer searches across the energy landscape for an absolute minimum... however in practice they often find a local minimum instead. So they are no good for finding the single solution to a problem, they are no good for running Shor's algorithm to break asymmetric cryptography, instead they can be used for problems where what is needed is simply a 'good enough' answer (a local energy minimum). These are travelling salesman type problems. Combinatorial optimisation. A quantum annealer can be incredibly useful for a certain use case. But it is no threat to bitcoin.



Relativity is experimentally verifiable. We can't really say it's the word of one man, when the effects are proven and reproducible. I'm not saying we'll definitely never find a way to travel faster than light, but the evidence at the moment is that this is the absolute limit. The effects on time and space are well known and, as I say, verifiable. It would require infinite energy for a thing with mass to hit light speed. Additionally, if object A and object B are moving away from a stationary observer in opposite directions, both travelling at c, then the relative speed of one to the other is not c+c=2c, it's c... the answer to the apparent discrepancy lying with time dilation.

Photons are massless and travel at the speed of light. This means that from the perspective of the photon, time does not pass. The distance from the Sun to the Earth is around 8 light minutes. This means that when you see the Sun, you are seeing it as it was 8 minutes ago, because the photons from the Sun travel at the speed of light. If the Sun were suddenly to go out, we would not notice this for 8 minutes. If instead we consider photons moving between two points on Earth, the distance is so small to make it effectively instantaneous.

My bold. It looks like the relevant common factor here is that you are buying cheap stuff, rather than that you're buying Chinese stuff.
Most products are made in China.
Some products are good, some are bad. Cheap products tend to be worse than expensive products, for obvious reasons.
If you buy cheap products that are no good, chances are they are from China.
Doesn't mean China is the problem.

Yes. 'Empty' spacetime still has a minimum vacuum energy, as described by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle for time and energy (rather than as we normally use in quantum physics, position and momentum). The 'endless fireworks of birth and annihilation' (which is a really nice description, by the way) is simply a manifestation of what spacetime is, with the quantum fields that are properties of spacetime.


Yes, it would be truly profound to be able somehow to 'see' this happen. I have been lucky enough in the past to be given particle traces from CERN to analyse, and it is remarkable to see the evidence in front of your eyes, even if it is  just a record of what has happened, rather than seeing it first-hand.


I'm not sure I agree. As far as we know, of the protons, neutrons and electrons that sit within an atom, the electron is a fundamental indivisible particle (I am simplifying again, meaning particle as the manifestation of the relevant underlying quantum field). Protons and neutrons are composite particles, built of quarks (which are fundamental). The quarks are held together by the strong nuclear force, which is mediated by (virtual) gluons. As far as we know, there is no further division possible beyond this point - and indeed this fits with the laws of physics as described by the standard model.

As far as I'm aware, Hund's 'bus seat' rule works because the lowest energy state is the one that maximises spin. So it is just 'easiest' (or 'most efficient') for the subshell to be singly occupied before the electrons start pairing up (because doubly occupied +1/2 and -1/2 equates to net zero spin).


When we talk about spontaneous birth and annihilation (as we have above), we are referring to the energy-time uncertainty inherent to the universe, as described by Heisenberg. We are talking about the uncertainty associated with an absolute minimum energy state, and the fact that this is non-zero. We must also consider that these quantum fluctuations manifest as virtual particles (i.e., they can't be detected directly), andd that they do so only for an extremely brief timespan. If we then consider the region of spacetime that is within an atom, then we are no longer talking about a minimum vacuum energy. However the uncertainty still remains, but it is uncertainty above that tiny non-zero limit.  It gets difficult when we start considering virtual particles, when really all we are talking about is a field fluctuation.


No, it's not empty space. Or, it's only empty space if we consider electrons, quarks etc as actually being particles, as being little dots with a physical size. When in fact, we know that the 'particle' has a wave function, and what we think oif as a 'particle' is simply a classical outcome of the wavefunction resolving to a discrete point. But quantum field theory describes it more eloquently. Everything that we see, everything that exists, is the relationship between perturbations of all of the quantum fields that exist as a part of spacetime. So 'empty space' within an atom is not the same as 'empty space' outside, because we have the wavefunction, because we have the electroweak force, because we have the strong force mediated by virtual gluons, and because these forces are fluctuations of quantum fields at that local point within the atom. Additionally, when we say 'if the atom is the size of a football field, the electron is the size of a large apple', what we actually mean is I think that if the atom is a football field, then the minimum resolvable unit of space as determined by Planck is the size of an apple. We can't ever say that the electron has a 'size' as such.


A qubit is just the fundamental unit of quantum information, so in theory any quantum property that resolves to two classical outcomes can be used as a qubit. Electron spin. Photon polarisation.


I think the term 'spin' as applied to an electron is just a description of its state, and does not refer to an electron actually rotating. It is an expression of the electron's inherent angular momentum. Firstly, electrons have no size (as far as we know), secondly, they are not physical objects, but rather field fluctuations. I don't think we can say that an electron rotates. However I certainly agree that time flows differently from the perspective of an electron.
This is all complicated by the fact that we have no real way as of yet of linking quantum mechanics with relativity.

Thanks Zwei, best of luck with Wolf.bet

This is a tragic event, and yet another example of how troubled countries can experience calamity after calamity. Lebanon suffers through being part of an unstable region, there was the seemingly endless civil war, and the economy was at breaking point even before CV19 hit. Now, as well as a failing economy and the pandemic, we have this explosion. People are focusing on the toll of the dead and injured, but this is only the short term effect. There will I'd imagine now be huge numbers of newly homeless people, to couple with the fact that this explosion was at the huge grain silo... so it's devastated the food supply, too, as well as (with no grain silo) the capability to store new incoming food. You couldn't really imagine a worse confluence of negative factors. The country will be in desperate need of aid from other nations - just at the exact same time that these nations are themselves struggling.

Unfortunately, I think it will get worse for the people of Lebanon. I really hope that other countries come together to assist here. We are all people irrespective of nation.

Things won't change this year, and they are very unlikely to change much next year, either, given that development has been much reduced and the regulation changes put back to 2022. It does reduce excitement when we are probably looking at 2 straight years of Merc total dominance - like it was in 2014, the first season with new rules after the Red Bull dominance.

But, signs are promising that the 2022 rule changes will not just be a reset for all teams, but will also bring the whole grid closer together as well as allowing easier overtaking. I know this has been said before, but it does look promising. If you're interested, there's a decent report here that explains why the 2022 rules should make it more exciting, and more dependent on who is the best driver rather than just who has the best car. Note, the article is a couple of years old, so refers to them as being '2021' changes, but as we know this is now postponed to 2022.

The coin has low marketcap and low volume, which translates to high volatility, and makes it extremely susceptible to manipulation by pump-and-dump groups. Regardless of any long-term potential of the coin, it must at the moment be regarded - as all low cap coins - as extremely risky. In general, the lower you go in marketcap, the higher the risk. We are looking here at a coin that sits well outside the top 500. Not saying it's good or bad, just be aware of the risk.

This is true. Bitcoin hitting ATH against a currency at the moment says a lot more about that currency than it does about bitcoin.
Bitcoin is however still a huge gamble in the short-term due to the volatility of which we're all aware. Perhaps in the long-term bitcoin can become a viable safe-haven and store-of-value, but it is certainly not there yet. Whilst crypto has done better than fiat in some nations recently, this does not mean that the situation will remain like this over the longer term.

It depends on how good you are at trading. If you haven't done any before, then try trading with small amounts and see if you can make more profit than loss.
One compromise strategy is to generally hold, but then whenever there is a huge and obvious market downturn, sell everything and buy back in at a lower point... so you are trading infrequently, but over the long term still make a considerable profit.

It is difficult to predict, as obviously the economic effects of an event can be felt long afterwards. We also have to consider whether there might be any partial or localised lockdowns in the future as the number of new cases remains high. Also, easing of lockdown and people returning to work might just mean that the damage stops getting worse. In the US this is complicated by the upcoming election. You might imagine that Trump will do anything he can to prop up the economy and make it look good in the short-term, with the longer-term effects of this only being felt after the election.

Same here in the UK. Lockdown is over, but city centres and out-of-town retail parks are still extremely quiet. Some businesses remain temporarily closed, some have closed permanently. People are allowed to go out, but aren't. The government is giving people 50% off prices for eating out on certain days - but the restaurants still look fairly empty. People know that the virus is still out there. The economy here will not recover any time soon.

Yes, I suspect that as everywhere else, there has been a surge in online orders. But this works disproportionately in favour of Amazon etc.; bricks-and-mortar businesses still suffer. And this effect is amplified by the fact that office workers are still working from home. Businesses that rely on city centre foot traffic will find it difficult to survive.

Finally, each day brings new newspaper headlines of some big multinational company shedding huge numbers of jobs. Partly from necessity, no doubt, but also I'd imagine to an extent many are using CV19 as an excuse to make huge 'efficiency' savings to reduce headcount for the benefit of shareholders.

Crisis always accelerates change, and this is a major crisis. Working patterns and online retail may have changed forever.

It is certainly worth holding ETH at the moment. This coin is the main reason for the prices rises we've seen across the board recently. There is of course no way of knowing how high it will go, and $400 has ben a difficult threshold in the past... but if ETH can break through and hold above that point (and we are so close at the moment), then it looks very good for the future.

Difficult to say how much is already priced in. Remember all the FOMO about bitcoin halving, but everyone knew it would happen, and it was factored in well ahead of time. Likely we will see the same with ETH 2.0. The only thing that complicates matters is that we don't know how much of the current rise is due to anticipation of 2.0, and how much is DeFi.
But whether or not we see an immediate rise for ETH after 2.0 goes live, the future does look very strong for Ethereum.

I'm not sure we'll reach a new ATH any time soon. And probably that sort of sudden, meteoric rise is not desirable anyway as it wouldn't be sustainable. It is probably better to have a slow, steady rise... that way we avoid the huge downturn like we saw in 2018. So I would hope that when we do get a new ATH, it is more like $30k than like $100k. And I suppose in theory, if the movement is slower, then as there is time for adoption to increase, then volumes will increase too, and we will see less volatility. I just don't think we should want too much, too soon.