Quantum computing and Bitcoin mining

[techmasta93]

Just saw this article: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/ibm-quantum-computer-how-work-commercial-api-faster-q-systems-computing-a7613271.html

For the lazy, IBM will soon be selling quantum computers commercially and will release the APIs for devs to create new programs for those computers... My question is, can we use these quantum computers to mine? Will this change the mining game? If not bitcoin, then maybe altcoins?

[NotFuzzyWarm]

ROFL

can we use these quantum computers to mine

Have you even seen what current QC's look like? Massive, use liquid He cooling, mega $$$$$...
Not bloody likely for many a years to come

[techmasta93]

ROFL

can we use these quantum computers to mine

Have you even seen what current QC's look like? Massive, use liquid He cooling, mega $$$$$...
Not bloody likely for many a years to come

Oh... Bummer. But the APIs will be released soon, so maybe we can at the very least begin developing mining software for these things. And if someone with enough capital can rent one out (Seeing as IBM wants to make them commercially available) he/she can dominate with their superior computing power. Maybe not probable, but possible?

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Some references from 2015
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326468&_mc=NL_EET_EDT_EET_daily_20150429
and http://machinedesign.com/technologies/quantum-computing-101

[brontosaurus]

This is a question thats come up many times. To put some perspective into the argument have a read at this article:

http://www.bitcoinnotbombs.com/bitcoin-vs-the-nsas-quantum-computer/

Please pay particular attention to the section quoting Bruce Schneier’s 1996 book, 'Applied Cryptography' and the effects of thermodynamics on the processing of information, coupled with Peter Shor's algoritm for a quantum computer to break public key encryption. It's east to forget about physical laws that don't at first glance seem to have any influence.

The basic message is : SHA256 is safe, period. ECSDA might be vulnerable if a viable quantum computer can be built and run reliably but that at the moment would seem to be some years away ay present!

On a side note I've just finished reading an excellent book by Simon Singh, 'The Code Book'. It was written some time ago, long before Bitcoin came into being but it's a very interesting history of codes and codebreaking. Also explains RSA and why super large prme numbers are so sought after.

[techmasta93]

This is a question thats come up many times. To put some perspective into the argument have a read at this article:

http://www.bitcoinnotbombs.com/bitcoin-vs-the-nsas-quantum-computer/

Please pay particular attention to the section quoting Bruce Schneier’s 1996 book, 'Applied Cryptography' and the effects of thermodynamics on the processing of information, coupled with Peter Shor's algoritm for a quantum computer to break public key encryption. It's east to forget about physical laws that don't at first glance seem to have any influence.

The basic message is : SHA256 is safe, period. ECSDA might be vulnerable if a viable quantum computer can be built and run reliably but that at the moment would seem to be some years away ay present!

On a side note I've just finished reading an excellent book by Simon Singh, 'The Code Book'. It was written some time ago, long before Bitcoin came into being but it's a very interesting history of codes and codebreaking. Also explains RSA and why super large prme numbers are so sought after.

Sure, SHA256 may be safe, but what about the other algos? Surely, someone will eventually program a miner that can run on a quantum computer using some other algo like scrypt or X11. Do you think these physical limitations you're referring to affect those algos as well?

[Amph]

This is a question thats come up many times. To put some perspective into the argument have a read at this article:

http://www.bitcoinnotbombs.com/bitcoin-vs-the-nsas-quantum-computer/

Please pay particular attention to the section quoting Bruce Schneier’s 1996 book, 'Applied Cryptography' and the effects of thermodynamics on the processing of information, coupled with Peter Shor's algoritm for a quantum computer to break public key encryption. It's east to forget about physical laws that don't at first glance seem to have any influence.

The basic message is : SHA256 is safe, period. ECSDA might be vulnerable if a viable quantum computer can be built and run reliably but that at the moment would seem to be some years away ay present!

On a side note I've just finished reading an excellent book by Simon Singh, 'The Code Book'. It was written some time ago, long before Bitcoin came into being but it's a very interesting history of codes and codebreaking. Also explains RSA and why super large prme numbers are so sought after.

Sure, SHA256 may be safe, but what about the other algos? Surely, someone will eventually program a miner that can run on a quantum computer using some other algo like scrypt or X11. Do you think these physical limitations you're referring to affect those algos as well?

scrypt is more hard memory, so i suspect it's even worse to make a low cost miner for that compared to sha256, x11 should be the first target if they ever want tot ake on that market

there are a bunch of other algo that are more easy to overtake, those that are prone to fpga or asic without memory hard limitation are the first one

[brontosaurus]

This is a question thats come up many times. To put some perspective into the argument have a read at this article:

http://www.bitcoinnotbombs.com/bitcoin-vs-the-nsas-quantum-computer/

Please pay particular attention to the section quoting Bruce Schneier’s 1996 book, 'Applied Cryptography' and the effects of thermodynamics on the processing of information, coupled with Peter Shor's algoritm for a quantum computer to break public key encryption. It's east to forget about physical laws that don't at first glance seem to have any influence.

The basic message is : SHA256 is safe, period. ECSDA might be vulnerable if a viable quantum computer can be built and run reliably but that at the moment would seem to be some years away ay present!

On a side note I've just finished reading an excellent book by Simon Singh, 'The Code Book'. It was written some time ago, long before Bitcoin came into being but it's a very interesting history of codes and codebreaking. Also explains RSA and why super large prme numbers are so sought after.

Sure, SHA256 may be safe, but what about the other algos? Surely, someone will eventually program a miner that can run on a quantum computer using some other algo like scrypt or X11. Do you think these physical limitations you're referring to affect those algos as well?

The minimum physical energy requirements to change the state of a digital bit applies no matter what the algorithm, Scrypt uses a random memory read /write algorithm plus sha256 for good measure. For any algorithm the amount of energy used in a brute force attack is direct proportional to the number of bits that may have to change state for each attempt.