Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: 512-qubit Quantum Computer acquired, is bitcoin doomed?
by
jellies
on 15/12/2013, 03:11:03 UTC
I found the paper in May that put two different qubit chips up against software and hardware solvers in a very specific class of problem, and the results were that with a problem that is most suitable for the chip it found a solution in half a second, several thousand times faster than the best traditional methods.

There were a lot of ifs/buts and exceptions however the V5 and V6 chips tested, when given the right kind of problem, were indeed able to solve it (it was an annealing problem) in a grand flash.

A clear eyed summary on that May paper, and the D-Wave devices is here: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/dwaves-year-of-computing-dangerously

I've no doubt that quantum computing is going to be an arms race, and it will start to solve in parallel more problems over time. Whether that includes searching for keys or cryptography I've no idea but if it does you CAN BET THAT NSA WILL NOT TELL US ABOUT IT.