Quantum Computing & Bitcoin
-Why the Microsoft Majorana 1 announcement is interesting
-Bitcoin's potential path forward w/ nostr:nprofile1qyg8wumn8ghj7vf5xqhxvdm69e5k7qgewaehxw309askgatvwshrzwrsd36hxtnnda3kjctvqqsqqqqqqqpn93urrkw94x03swhu9qf6da56zmka5lm0crkczyzkdesmf0g64 BIP360 proposal
-My attempt at making quantum understandable
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That's quite the library, š
oh this one again.... š„±
save yourself a whole lot of headache and listen closely:
but my bet is Schopenhauer's comments on intelligence and isolation win out this thread....
call me in ten years when your egos shrink.
godlessness sure does lead to error...
and.... thats called LOGIC!
Quantum is a boogeyman. "Quantum resistance" is going to be the backdoor
Interesting take considering BIP360 is a softfork.
I see your concern Preston, but we also donāt want to treat this as an asteroid that is imminently about strike the earth.
Anytime that action is being encouraged from a place of fear, bad things seem to happen.
A lot of other things would be in peril before #Bitcoin should this Microsoft product scale in qubitsā¦..
Completely agree. Hopefully that same sentiment came through in the video.
Yes it did!
The difference between Bitcoin and other threatened systems (bank accounts, email) is that those systems can plan to go down for a day while they upgrade to a quantum resistant fix. Bitcoin can't go down for maintenance and implementing whatever solution is required is going to take time as it will require moving all UTXOs to new addresses. Given bitcoin's throughput of about 4000 transactions every 10 minutes, a solution must be in place months before any quantum threat becomes real. Plus, given that the proposed solution is a soft fork, wouldn't it be better to implement it sooner rather than later? Better to have it and not need it than not have it and need it.
Looking at the totality of the situation, I donāt see an imminent threat months from now.
Thanks for elevating this Preston. Not only is there a risk that quantum computing may come sooner than we thought but also the issue that once we have a quantum-resistant solution fork activated it will still take time (months?) for everyone to move all their UTXOs to the new addresses.
Exactly. The expected noise reduction on the Majorana 1 is very interesting and a 10X improvement from all the other QC. Itās enough for people to start paying attentionā¦
Hey fellow Nostriches: @HunterBeast is asking for donations to help develop the BIP. Definitely work zapping them some sats.
Thanks for laying this out. I agree it needs to be taken it seriously, Iām glad there are people like you spreading the word. Letās continue to watch it close!
Thanks Prestonš«”
Letās stay optimistic without letting our guard downš
"orders of magnitude" more qbits is required, which is the cube of the cost of energy to run them, btw (i'm talking about sucking the heat out of the chips it doesn't matter whether you parallel or not because the cost of removing 10x as much heat is more than 10x as much energy on any practical scale
we are far from them being able to do a pubkey reverse derivation by at least 10 years, assuming they are able to scale up their power plants for their data centers to use nuclear power, and that assumes that it's cost effective for the average yield of an attack
simply adding a new address type that uses 256 bit hash instead of 160 would be enough to push it 10 years into the future, IMO
solving the problem of coinjoin and payjoin coordination would mean you could use musig2 composite schnorr (taproot) signatures a lot more and it would also have the side effect of cutting the size of transactions
coordination of coinjoin, in particular, is a trivial problem if the parties involved have a high degree of trust with each other
meanwhile, microsoft is clearly backing off from investing in data centers, as they FUD bitcoin
What nobody seems to bring up is the complete lack of a proof of concept attack on something easier to Crack. An 8bit DSA analogon cracked by a 48 logical Qbits machine could be a useful canary. PoW!
All the QC arguments I have heard over the years are fear based with minimal backup, because spooky quantum.
48 logical qubits donāt exist yet - as pointed out in the video.
My main point: We need a canary - an intentionally weak, 8-bit ECDSA - something that small (available) quantum computers can actually crack. Otherwise, quantum cryptographers will keep feeding us suckers the FUD we deserve. Give them a real target or shut them down. I've seen this grift from the inside for years.
I have a lot to say about this.
Could you explain why a UTXO is not a qubit? It appears to me Satoshi solved decoherence 16 years ago and NOBODY has recognized it.
What role might centralization play in quantum computing?
Jack I know youāre super smart, so I respect your point of view immensely. Help me understand the context of your question better.
Fundamentally, quantum mechanics has been a language problem since discovery. We havenāt had a ālanguageā to actually understand and communicate it until bitcoin; which describes the relationship of energy, information and time. Use Bitcoin as the lens to think through.
What physicists call a qubit has an identical nature to UTXO. In both, energy is fundamental.
Superposition: UTXOs are in a constant state of spendability (0 or 1) and their state is unknown until blocks are mined; only probabilistic.
Entanglement: A single UTXO can be sent to infinite addresses, split innumerable ways, can interact with any other UTXO and can interact with UTXOs from different times. Remember, all UTXOs exist in the past except the ones in the present block.
Measurement: Mining is the measurement of hashes per valid nonce and the measurement collapses the indeterminate block config into a single deterministic verifiable state. This also sets the direction in quantum measurement (which UTXOs become spent and which remain unspent)
UTXOs persist indefinitely through time; it appears Satoshi solved decoherence 16 years ago. Again, itās a language and expectation problem. We are told QM is too complex to for us understand, trust the physicists.
The ledger is the ātimespaceā (history from Genesis) and the current block is the āspacetimeā or the present.
Given this context, is it possible a UTXO is a qubit? What properties is a UTXO missing to be one?
What effects could centralization have on a quantum system? (Think Bitcoin, ownership, nodes, mining)
What is more important for a quantum computer to compute than perfect money and a shared equal reality with no singular observer?
Makes me think of the qubit explanation in this video
Yes!
This discussion was actually what brought all of the pieces together for me. I have been thinking about how to approach Frederico about Bitcoin and this idea. He 99% of the way there without saying āBitcoinā.
Surely itās not a coincidence heās created the first commercial microprocessor and heās arrived here.
Most physicists discussing āinformational physicsā are simply missing Bitcoin; they want the credit for what Satoshi already created.
Understanding level: 30%. Interest level: 100%.
This is a dope analogy. Do you have thoughts on manifestation into practical applications? Can you build a compute engine using this info or are there other uses?
I have very little programming experience; I donāt know what is possible. I do believe it is imperative for those who are building on top of bitcoin to understand this.
I will say, it appears free human action is the computation we are looking for.
Will a peer to peer electronic cash system compute and coordinate the collaboration and complexity we all desire?
Thought experiment: what if nodes are where/when the observable flux action āknotsā axiomatic/math-based probability with the heretofore unknown. The edge of spacetime on the blockchain.
And maybe anonymous decentralization (of nodes but also of spender-receiver) may be figured as spooky action at a distance still enmeshed/entangled with the social contract underlying the relativistic āinherent valueā of any tokenized truth-exchange.
Hum, but what is the QT parallel to the free market?
Consensus is everything.
The conservation of energy using a peer to peer electronic (energy) cash system is how the universe operates. Conservation of energy is fundamental, even between systems.
It seems we are disregarding more esoteric forms of consciousness determining value in ways we cannot perceive. You must confront consciousness in Quantum Theory. Bitcoin has no hesitation in doing so.
We can only look forward into bitcoin. Imagine being āinside Bitcoinā and trying to look back and outward at us. Perspective.
In my opinion thereās much to learn about the universe from Bitcoin, starting with temperature and the awful semantics we call the āBig Bangā. Why else can we look back? Sure its not timespace š
Bitcoin is the closest thing weāve ever had to an objective observer position between time, energy, and data.
This is an awesome vehicle by which to draw comparisons between the odd behaviors of quantum and relatable classical systems.
I donāt believe however they are the same thing. Bitcoin is a complex system that just so happens to emit similar emergent properties as quantum.
Where things break down are in the details. Like where actual entangled particles can influence each other from infinite distance.
Well yes, but what we view as particles have the same behavior as UTXOs, except bitcoin exists in one system forward (universe inside of a universe). UTXOs from the past can exert influence on UTXOs in the present; how do you measure how far addresses are apart from each other?
I believe this is a more wholistic answer to spacetime; weāve neglected to observe timespace this whole time. I donāt claim to have all the answers, but it is clear this is the lens to find them.
Because the Genesis Block UTXO is unspendable, letās talk about the UTXO in Block 1; the furthest UTXO away from us in time. Is this a distance?
If that UTXO in Block 1 was to move in the next block, do you think it would exert influence on other UTXOs, or the humans making decisions behind their UTXOs?
nostr:nprofile1qqsg2zqd8wkhpnxu6lm5c2dyfa2mhpwte57apjae2ldp6g2mmwf3ypqce0wa2 I loved your video yesterday on quantum. This is a great analogy/explanation. Wow. Great post!
nostr:nprofile1qqsg2zqd8wkhpnxu6lm5c2dyfa2mhpwte57apjae2ldp6g2mmwf3ypqce0wa2 oops I got trigger happy tagging you! Haha
There isnāt a wave function describing the evolution of a UTXO. Not sure you can really compare UTXOs to qubits.
Following your logic regular bits are also qubits.
Generally the way I have been approaching this is that a UTXO exhibits the properties of a particle in an unspent state and the properties of a wave in a spent state (when it is moving between addresses) we have to remember the time scale between events is enormous when comparing a wave function to Block Time.
Please explain how regular bits are qubits?
A UTXO is always in an unspent state. UTXOās are instantly created/destroyed as new blocks are mined. Time doesnāt exist for a UTXO.
I fail to see how the analogy helps to understand bitcoin. But thatās only my view.
Yes but we actually donāt know if a UTXO will be spent in the next block (superposition) until the block is mined (measured) and confirmed.
Only by looking to the past can you derive ultimate certainty for that discrete unit of time, but this is the PAST state, not the present state. You literally donāt know its present state, yet it is fully probabilistic in nature where it will be in the next block. When spent, the UTXO ceases to exist as an independent particle/ data entry in space (memory), and new UTXOs emerge in its place in new space (memory)
Time does exist for UTXOs, it is called blocks. Itās literally a measurement of distance between UTXOs (particles) in time. The UTXO only actually exists in memory of the block in which the transaction was observed (mined) in time. Bitcoin certainly quantized time.
You might be confusing a few things:
- Your use the term probabilistic here isnāt appropriate as one could know the future state of a given UTXO before a block is added to the chain. Colluding with every miner would allow this.
- A UTXO doesnāt evolve as a function of time. It is created and destroyed, this without a causal link to time or block height.
Still probabilistic. You still donāt know who will mine a block unless you absolutely control 100% of the hash with pure certainty. And that would also require a singular entity/observer always deciding which transactions are included or which qubits are measured. Why is the starting to sound like traditional quantum computing?
What do you mean without a link to time? You know deterministically when a UTXO was occupying a point in space (memory) and when it was not; full history
The day you can show one of your UTXO spend itself at random without you initiating a transaction then maybe itās quantum (more likely you have been hacked).
Really check your definition of āprobabilisticā
Thatās not what I am saying. Yes you have absolute certainty about your UTXOs only because you are the owner and controller. No other UTXO will have absolute certainty and its location in the next block is probabilistic. Iām talking about the entire UTXO set.
And regardless, you can broadcast a transaction with high fees and not get mined; itās still probabilistic even when visibly broadcasted to peopleās mempool.
Thatās why Bitcoin is so interesting
In my humble opinion, Bitcoin is more than interesting; itās the answer physicists have been looking for over the past 125 years when Max Planck originally proposed the concept of quanta.
We finally have a language and a system to understand it all.
Now the battle is against the fiat institutionalization in academia. Bitcoin doesnāt just fix physics, it completes it.
And it seems to be to only way to push civilisation forward by escaping the system of incentivesing people stealing from each other
So how would you compute with a utxo before/after it is spent. What about entanglement? It is such a misunderstanding that superposition is what makes quantum special (or difficult). Superposition happens classically all the time. Go look at light through a prism or waves in the oceanā¦
hey nostr:npub1s5yq6wadwrxde4lhfs56gn64hwzuhnfa6r9mj476r5s4hkunzgzqrs6q7z
This might be interesting for you and help to put these pieces together to understand better risks to Bitcoin coming from Quantum Computing. Below is a quote from an internal Google meeting held in October 2019. This is the only quote that caught my attention and I wrote it down.
"Quantum computing requires us to be able to encode classical Cube code into super-positional quantum state, this itself could take an exponential amount of time and ruin our quantum speed up."
I'm not an expert in this field, and perhaps it's no longer an issue. My very simple understanding is that QC beside doing simple math which is being demonstrated by leading corporations, to crack a serious problem, also needs an equation (like a program) to be modeled first, referred here as classical Cube code. But I could be very wrong here. It would be nice os someone could confirm/deny my understanding.
Regards
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Not a techie? No problem. This quick video breaks down SHA-256āthe cryptographic magic that keeps Bitcoin secureāin a way anyone can understand. š§©š”
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https://youtube.com/watch?v=S9JGmA5_unY
Once you've got the basics,
@PrestonPyshās (preston@primal.net) video on quantum computing is a great follow-up. Staying informed and updating your knowledge is key to adapting in the tech age. š
