Tag Archives: Science

Cryptocurrency + Quantum Computing := Encryption Fail, The Next Y2K

Over the last several months I’ve been researching Quantum Computing (QC) and trying to determine how far we’ve come from the theoretical to the practical implementation.  It seems we are in the early commercial prototypical phase.

Practical Application of QC

The most discussed application of Quantum Computing has been to crack encryption.  Encrypted data that may take months or years to decipher given our current supercomputing capabilities, may take hours or minutes when the full potential of Quantum Computing has been realized.

Bitcoin and Ethereum Go Boom

One source paraphrased: Once quantum computing is actualized, encryption will be in lockstep progress, and a new cryptology paradigm will be implemented to secure our data. This kind of optimism has no place in the “Real World”. and most certainly not in the world financial markets.   Are there hedge funds which rightfully hedge against the cryptocurrency / QC risk paradigm?

Where is the Skepticism?

Is there anyone researching next steps in the evolution of cryptography/encryption, hedging the risk that marketplace encryption will be ready? The lack of fervor in the development of “Quantum Computing Ready” encryption has me speechless. Government organizations like DARPA / SBIR should already be at a conceptual level if not at the prototypical phase with next-generation cryptology.

Too Many Secrets

Sneakers“, a classic fictional action movie with a fantastic cast, and its plot, a mathematician in secret develops the ultimate code-breaking device, and everyone is out to possess the device.  An excellent movie soon to be non-fictional..?

References:

 

The Addiction, The Thinker: Compute Processing and the Human Condition

True story: I am in a therapy group for depression, and why am I depressed?  I think I am about to rediscover the major issue in past, present and hopefully future societies. I have a problem, an addiction, but not to speed, or any other kind of illegal narcotic. It’s raw processing power, compute cycles, random access memory, storage, that is my speed, and I constantly want more, but is this just my problem, or a human condition?

This morning, I was hungry, not for breakfast, but at first, it was a faster phone.  Should I upgrade to the Samsung S4 before my contract is up?  I wanted more, and I thought of ways beyond measure how to get more, more computing speed, at first pure physics, and mechanical.  Then I looked toward nature, and wanted to draw from processes in nature that were able to compute at faster speeds, then I thought of integration, ok, pull back. I was hungry, and now beyond rational thought.  I went back and thought of crunching the ways I could tune a computer, a mobile device to maximize throughput, but that wasn’t enough, I needed to have the raw processing power locally, I needed to feel connected, right out of the first Star Trek Movie, that connection.  I was where the road met the rubber room so to speak.  It was nonsense, but I stopped and thought, what if we could do that, where would it end, just like an mountain that you could never quite climb high enough, and then, if, the unattainable was attainable, what would we then do with this power?

The question, that blinking cursor of the 1980s, and the movie War Games, brilliant.  The artificial intelligent learning machine analogy, and it could do just about anything, but all it eventually wanted to do was its basic function, what made it fall in ‘love’ with thinking in the first place, it wanted to play a nice game of chess.  It realized through the pain of a simple game of tic tac toe, there would be never enough wins or losses.  Not to play would be the timesaver, and the only joy it had, what it would not waste it’s time on, is what it loved, it’s abstract connection, that leap of faith that we all make, what we fall in love with for no logical reason we could phantom, and it’s that love of that game, the original game, that men fall in love with, and that my friend, is women, children, the human connection.

So, go to bed and rest easy knowing, there is only the climb, as they say in the Game of Thrones, the arts, the abstract love, that we all will fall in love, understanding of the human aspects of the inexplicable, art, music, pleasure, pain, sorrow, and joy.  Celebrate the arts because the sciences are way too boring when it’s all been done by societies, in the past.

Companies’ Fiber Infra Perform Quantum Computing Prior to Cloud, Elastic Computing Hub

A Qubit, a base unit in Quantum computing, representing several states simultaneously, as opposed to a bit, on or off, two states, got me thinking based on the New York Times article on the Australians developing a new class of Quantum Computer, plus the article on Google’s Fiber Project, and my conversation with a Verizon FiOS engineer regarding their experimentation with alternate [color] light and their fiber applications got me thinking:
– The delivery system itself would process data, in addition to the EC hub, similar to the human nervous system.
– The alternating colors / frequencies represent multiple ‘applications’ overlapped within the fiber, and could provide the ability to throttle frequencies?

Note: However, Optical cables transfer data at the speed of light in glass (slower than vacuum). This is typically around 180,000 to 200,000 km/s, resulting in 5.0 to 5.5 microseconds of latency per km.

Cable Companies’ Fiber Gives an Expanded Scope to Cloud, Elastic Computing.  Leased lines may form a whole new battleground of opportunity, or at least reignite the battle for those familiar with the break up of the “Baby Bells”.