Not really. It's still just 1s and 0s in quantum computing - the difference is superposition, the fact that in QC multiple states exist simultaneously. So as you increase the number of qubits (x), the processing power increases exponentially, 2^x.

With a single bit, a classical computer can be 0 or 1, but a single qubit can be 0 and 1... 2 states simultaneously.
With 2 bits, a classical computer can be 00, 01, 10 or 11... but still only processing sequentially, one outcome at a time... whereas a 2 qubit QC can be 00, 01, 10 and 11 simultaneously, so (crudely) analogous to 4 classical computers running at the same time.
With 3 bits, 8 possible states for a classical computer to process sequentially... and 8 (i.e., 2³) states for a QC to process simultaneously, like 8 classical computers running at the same time... etc.

It's this ability of QCs to try multiple paths simultaneously that makes them so good for problems like factoring. It doesn't mean they are hugely faster than classical computers for every task, but for certain specialised tasks a QC can turn the almost-impossible into the trivial.

Have a look at this thread if you're interested in QC - my favourite thread on the forum! We've been having an interesting and quite in-depth discussion!

Apparently (according to Coindesk) the latest sell-off was due to a report on the PlusToken scam. It seems kind of a minor thing, but then I suppose the market sentiment is quite jittery at the moment, and it doesn't take much to trigger panic-selling.

Cox's Orange Pippin is a nice apple; I had them a lot as a child.

I've also seen Jet Cash recommending "Sops in Wine" apples, although I've not heard of them myself.

Supermarket fruit is a good example of the effects of globalisation. Fewer varieties, and selected more for appearance than for taste - perhaps most evident in the huge, luridly red and almost entirely tasteless strawberries that are so prevalent.

Try the small, independent, organic growers, and try buying straight from source. Supermarket mass-produced stuff is bland and ubiquitous.

The Olympics should be about the individual, rather than the country. I appreciate that elite athletes wouldn't get government funding if they weren't competing under a flag, but really - the Olympics is about individual excellence, is it not?

Russia as a country should be banned because of state-sponsored doping, but Russian athletes should be allowed to compete if they can be proven clean. The idea of banning someone purely because of where they were born seems to go strongly against the Olympic ideal. Last time around there was a 'Refugee' team, which was a brilliant move. Why can't we have a 'Drug-Free Independents' team? Appreciate the team name could use some work...

Ethereum is dropping along with everything else. I'm not sure how much if any effect the launch of 2.0 is going to have. Arguably it is already priced in.
I do think there is still reason to be confident for the longer-term, it's just that short-term it is quite difficult and feels painful.

1. No, it expired (see 3).
2. Yes.
3. No.
4. Yes.

Disagree, in the context of the question 'Are you a citizen of the world?' This I think is much more important as a psychological question than as merely a list of how many countries you have visited. We are one species on one planet, and a huge proportion of the trouble and conflict that arises between people is due to staking a claim to a certain patch of land. It is all everybody's. We are all citizens of the world. The sooner we all realise this, the better - fewer wars, greater compassion, and perhaps even a meaningful and coordinated response to climate change.

Apparently Mars has been battered by 635,000 meteors.
I'm not disputing that Mars is battered, but I don't understand how a meteor can do it, because a meteor has no opposable thumbs and so can't operate the deep fryer. Astronomy is perplexing.

42 was the answer to how much merit I need to make Senior. Until I got +1 yesterday for a discussion about apples. Grr.

Yes, such as we have in modern politics. One tactic that the modern political liar uses to avoid exposure is sheer speed. If Trump for example seems to lurch from crisis to crisis, that is entirely the point. Whenever he says something outrageous, it becomes a news headline - but there is almost no time to investigate and expose the lie before he comes out with some new shocking pronouncement, which submerges the first and renders it mere history. This is deliberate - a lie has a limited shelf-life, and by keeping the turnover sufficiently rapid, the lies stay fresh and have the desired impact. The liar is only in trouble once he slows down.

Greed has always been there, it's an evolutionary trait that is positively selected for (sorry, poor grammar). But excessive greed is also negatively selected for.

If we just consider two points:

1) Finite resources. Lets look at the historical perspective, with our distant ancestors. If you need one piece of fruit a day to survive, it doesn't matter that you are greedy and eat 10 pieces, unless (a) you strip the trees bare and then run out of available food, and die. It seems likely that individuals who exhibit this sort of behaviour pattern will be self-selected out of the gene pool. The other finite-resources scenario, (b), is that you live in a social group and need to share finite resources. Here, evolution selects for social behaviour, the 'selfish gene' theory, whereby your personal greed is offset by wanting to support those with whom you share a genetic make-up, firstly your family, secondly the wider tribe. So in both these scenarios, the individual and the tribe-member, greed on an individual basis is constrained by natural selection.

2) Abstraction of value. This is what we have nowadays, and is what makes the effects of rampant greed more apparent. Thousands of years ago you were limited by the amount of fruit you could eat or the amount you could carry. There was a physical limit to how far your greed could go. Now though, 'value' is synonymous with money, and there is no limit to how many zeroes you can accrue in your bank account. Inequality can rise to ridiculous levels, and because the population is so large, and rich people are in general separated from the poor, it is not so obvious to the rich that they are doing anything wrong. You don't see a billionaire sharing a neighbourhood with homeless people, or with starving people  in the third world. Of course billionaires are not stupid, and many of them do start to give back, e.g. Bill Gates, it's just that the negative effects of the greed are not so immediately obvious.

So I think greed has always been there, and in the past was controlled by evolution, but nowadays with abstraction there is no limit to how greedy you can be.

I think it was a bit of a bubble, yes, driven by FOMO and a slew of media articels as the price rose, which drew in new blood, which pushed the price higher...

However, this sort of price movement is not unprecedented. It just looks that way on a linear-scale price chart, because bitcoin has periods like this of phenomenal exponential growth, which reduces previous bull runs to flat smears.

You really need to switch the charts to logarithmic scale to get some perspective (below). Now we can see both the cyclic pattern and the general upwards movement. It becomes apparent that the 2017 rise was not as crazy as it seemed, and also that the terrible bear market that followed was also not quite as bad as it seemed.

On log scale, the future still looks very bright indeed

Mercrepey is good, but Creptune is batter.

I only eat decentralised apples.

No, that's superstition.

7 is generally considered lucky in the West, and 8 in the East.

7/7/7 was the most popular day ever for Vegas weddings ... Not sure if that also means that weddings on 7/7/7 end up having the highest divorce rate

Bounty campaigns are not what they were. I got in in 2017, and back then every new project raised millions, and there were a lot of good bounties. Now there are far fewer, and those that are any good either have very limited participants or small rewards. It's a consequence of the prevailing market sentiment. 2017 was crazy, everything was hugely hyped. Now expectations are more realistic, which can only be good for crypto in the long run.

As for rank, yes, it is certainly very difficult to rank up in the forum - or at least I find it difficult, I have only earned about 100 merit and I am still 40 away from Senior, which seems a huge distance. I've no idea how people get from Senior to Hero.

But given the first point and the decline in bounty rewards in general, this makes forum rank less important.

Previously I mocked this thread, but now I have come to my senses. I took a photo of Mars this morning (below), and it is indeed flat. You can even see the crust around the edge to keep all the butter and syrup martian rocks from falling off.

I wouldn't be surprised if he has declared war on the three separately...

• Ban water! Everyone has access to water, which makes it socialist, which makes it A Bad Thing.
• Ban saving! Everyone needs to spend to help the economy. It is un-American to save.
• Ban toilets! Studies have shown that toilets contain human fecal matter. Toilets are a health hazard. Toilets should be shot on sight. And then the contaminated toilet shards should be scraped up by trained professionals.

Would you be at all surprised if he actually said any of these things? No, of course you wouldn't. The man is a fool.

$100,000 may on the face of it seem quite unlikely, but we have seen that sort of exponential growth before. Basically if $100,000 were to happen, it wouldn't be a huge surprise to most of us. But also stagnation around current levels or even a fall to $5,000 wouldn't be a surprise either.

So what this means is that any price in the range $5,000 to $100,000 in 2020 would be reasonable. So you can make any price predication in this sort of range. The question is are these people saying it will hit that price, or that it could. If 'could', then fine, we all agree. If 'will', then that's absurd, no-one has that level of certainty where crypto prices are concerned.

I know a little about quantum mechanics, and next to nothing about cryptography.

Micius has demonstrated QKD wirelessly via satellite. There have been demonstrations using traditional fibre-optic lines, but the entangled state is more vulnerable to collapse using this approach, so satellite may be the better option.

A pair of entangled photons is generated using an interferometer, and one photon is sent to each party in the communication. If in the Micius example you can communicate with the satellite, then you can receive the photon.

They aim to have a global quantum network in place by 2030. I have no opinion on whether or not 2030 is realistic.

Quantum cryptography doesn't rely so much on key complexity, it relies more on quantum entanglement, and the fact that a measurement of one photon disturbs the other photon. Hacking is not possible based on the laws of quantum mechanics as we understand them.

I'm not suggesting that quantum cryptography is the only or best approach, just that work is progressing here and it's not necessarily only post-quantum cryptography that should be discussed. There have been objections to QKD itself, but again work is progressing towards better solutions - Kak's 3 stage protocol for example (basically a quantum version of double-lock):


_{https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Partha_Basuchowdhuri/publication/1960902/figure/fig2/AS:279938969161741@1443754059593/Kaks-three-stage-protocol.png}

Most price predictions by "experts" are complete nonsense. If you want to get yourself noticed, just make a ridiculous claim, the more ridiculous the better.
The best idea is probably to starve these people of attention.