Thoughtful essay from Nic Cater on why Bitcoiners should care about quantum computing risks even though they are quite low for the foreseeable future.
https://murmurationstwo.substack.com/p/bitcoin-and-the-quantum-problem-part-47f
Discussion
Another perspective.
Given how much investment is pouring into quantum computing, it appears that this theory is wholly unconvincing.
tbf investment pouring into quantum computing isn't wholly convincing either
This is shitcoiner logic.
That's the exact point I made in my repost. Nic's 10 arguments are all arguments from consensus. Fiat thinking.
Use your big boy words; "shitcoiner logic" has no meaning since everyone is a shitcoiner.
nostr:npub1hqaz3dlyuhfqhktqchawke39l92jj9nt30dsgh2zvd9z7dv3j3gqpkt56s agrees.
You are one of the most evil shitcoiners and a disgusting manipulator, Slopp.
Everybody thinks so, ergo it must be true?
No, but price is the strongest signal in markets and if your argument was convincing to the markets then quantum companies would be valued far closer to zero.
do you think that holds true with broken money? also blockchain hype, dot-com bubble and other examples showed that malinvestment exists
i am not picking sides, just feel your arguments also don't convince
Let me simplify it for you: a quantum computer can't scale because thermodynamics takes over at scale. That's not a problem you can engineer your way out of.
Measuring the utility or validity of something by the amount of money wasted on it is a poor metric.
Nope, money is one of the strongest possible signals. You claiming that it's "wasted" is subjective. The money being put at risk is an objective signal, one could argue that investment is a form of prediction market.
I claim it has been wasted because, objectively, zero utility has been produced.
I agree that money can be a useful signal, but it's far from infallible. The vast majority of all VC investments fail generate a postive ROI. Therefore, VC investment != validation.
In regards to QC, the investment is a signal for desire/hope and gullability, not validiation of the research or technology.
I would venture to guess that none of the people making the financial allocations into QC understand it.
The actual world is neither classical nor quantum. It's real. This confusion is what I call Fiat Thinking. Let's resist the temptation to confuse the map for the territory and lose our common sense. By the logic of Nic's framework here, we should expend unlimited energy on any apocalyptic bugaboo. In this age of bubbles and apocalypse fear marketing, that's not a great idea. Nic's 10 arguments are all arguments from consensus.
QC isn't coming. AGI isn't coming. There is no logical reason to believe that either is even possible. They are both pure articles of faith.
I like Nic, but this is a swing and a miss.
It’s surreal watching OG Bitcoiners now insist Bitcoin is “broken” and must be “fixed.”
You acting as if a fractional-reserve ontology of physics, a theory built on unmeasured, multiply-claimed “states”, could threaten a system rooted in real conservation, real energy, real proof.
If fractional-reserve accounting can’t produce sound money, why would fractional-reserve physics produce sound computation?
Superposition is just as real as the energy that goes into hashing a new block.
Superposition isn’t a physical coexistence of states, it’s a discretized potential, an unmined field of possibilities. These states don’t “exist” as a computable substrate; they are simply the unresolved entropy of the system. Until energy is spent to collapse that entropy into a single outcome, nothing is real, nothing is measurable, nothing is “at once.” They have not yet been mined, meaning they have not yet been measured. Physics has mistaken the mempool for the ledger.
I think the bigger threat which is at our door step today are the entities whom created and are supporting the fiat system today. Bitcoin was created to set us free and fiat was created to do the opposite. If you bend the knee to any form of KYC, then in my mind you are supporting the fiat system's battle against Bitcoin.
Know thy enemy well because they have a 112 year head start. I wonder what odds Vegas would give on Bitcoin winning the war?
I see a lot of the same hand-waving arguments coming from QC researchers as I saw at QC conferences in the early 2000s. As systems grow, things don’t always scale the same. I’m no longer involved in QC so I won’t pretend to be an expert but I believe this isn’t just an engineering challenge. There may very well be fundamental physics challenges that limit the viability of large scale QC systems. I wouldn’t bet against human ingenuity but this complexity doesn’t compare to LLMs where the discovery was simply more compute.