Google to Crack Bitcoin

Yahoo reports:

Google recently issued two warnings in a span of a few days.

First, quantum computers will be able to crack cryptography encrypting cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) by 2029. In fact, hackers might try stealing encrypted financial details right now and wait until 2029 for quantum computers to become powerful enough to decrypt those details.

Google recommended transition to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) to address the threat.

Second, a quantum system could crack a real-time Bitcoin transaction in about nine minutes. Here is how it could happen.

When a Bitcoin transaction is executed, the public key is revealed for a brief period. A quantum computer powerful enough can use the public key to find out the private key and steal the crypto assets.

It takes approximately 10 minutes for a Bitcoin transaction to confirm; the probability of success is only slightly less than 41%, the paper estimated.

The paper also revealed that it could take fewer than 500,000 qubits — far less than millions of qubits cited earlier — to crack Bitcoin's cryptography. It's a 20-fold reduction in the number of qubits needed to crack the encryption.

If there is a quantum computer, it would have to crack someone's key in that 10-minute window to steal money. The computers would have to be millions of times more efficient than they are now.

If the quantum computers get close, the Bitcoin community could change their protocols to resist the attack. It might be difficult to get everyone to agree to a new protocol. But as long as they did agree, the attack would be easily defended.

Dr. Quantum Supremacy has his take on the new announcements. I am skeptical, as usual.

In particular, the Caltech group estimates that a mere 25,000 physical qubits might suffice for this, where a year ago the best estimates were in the millions.

Here is a new PBS tv video on The Truth About Quantum Computers.

4:47 Microsoft claimed not only had they observed Majoranas, they also figured out how to control them. And they said they'd be able to use them to build reliable qubits that would be able to hold up in ways that other qubits can't. This breakthrough would provide a much faster pathway to quantum computing at a much larger scale than anyone else has been able to achieve. Microsoft was faced with an avalanche of skepticism. And as of filming, the data hasn't firmly established everything they claimed.

But some are optimistic that Microsoft can improve its chip and provide the breakthrough the industry has been waiting for. If they do, the whole world will change fast as we gain the ability to solve all kinds of problems we can't currently fully explore. For example, we might be able to create computer simulations of our world, down to the molecular level. That would open the door for incredible breakthroughs in chemistry and medicine. Or we could develop new battery technology, which could be key for mitigating climate change.

So this "truth" is all speculation.

A River is now a Science Journal Co-author

Centuries ago, scientists might thank God, or cite Christianity for their belief in an orderly world. No science journal would tolerate that today, right?

Actually the leading science journal, Nature, has publish an article praising a river god.

Biology professor Jerry Coyne reports:

Conservationist Anne Poelina has a deep connection to the fresh water that runs through the dry red-rock landscape of the Kimberley region in Western Australia. Poelina identifies as a Nyikina Warrwa woman, and her people are the Traditional Custodians of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River. ...

Poelina explains that “in terms of property rights, the river owns me. So, I have a duty of care and the fiduciary duty to protect this river’s right to life.” ...

In 2020, she started including the Martuwarra River of Life as the first author on her publications. ...

When asked why the river should be listed as first author, she responded: “Because it’s the authority. It’s where I get my authority.”

This is not religious tolerance. This is a Wokeness statement.

China has taken over Science

T. Greer argues China is the future of science:

The scientific publisher Nature makes a similar catalog on a slightly more granular level, looking at specific fields of science. According to Nature’s most recent rankings, 18 of the top 25 most productive research institutes in the physical sciences, 19 of the top 20 in geosciences, and a full 25 out of 25 in chemistry are Chinese. Only in the biosciences do American scientists still have a lead—but even on that list three of the top ten are Chinese.6

The kicker is, none of that was true even just a decade ago.

The QWERTY Keyboard was not Designed to be Slow

I need to watch Youtube with an AI LLM to fact check it.

Physicist Brian Keating posted a cosmology interview, and started making a false analogy about keyboard. My AI advises:

While Brian Keating is an astrophysicist and not a historian of technology, he is repeating a very common popular myth. The claim that the QWERTY layout was designed specifically to "slow down" typists is technically incorrect, though it is based on a grain of truth regarding mechanical limitations.

According to historical research into the origins of the typewriter:

The "Jamming" Problem: In early mechanical typewriters, if a typist hit two keys that were physically close to each other in rapid succession, the "typebars" (the hammers that hit the paper) would collide and jam.

The Real Purpose of QWERTY: The layout was designed to separate frequently used letter pairs (like "TH" or "ST") so their physical hammers were on opposite sides of the machine. This allowed the hammers to fall back into place before the next one rose, actually allowing the user to type faster without the machine seizing up.

The "Slow Down" Misconception: The myth likely arose because the layout is not "ergonomically optimal" for modern electronic keyboards. Since we no longer have mechanical hammers to worry about, the QWERTY layout seems unnecessarily difficult compared to alternatives like the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard.

In the video, Keating uses this as an analogy for "technological lock-in", arguing that even if a system is no longer the most efficient, it becomes so widespread that it is nearly impossible to replace—much like he fears is happening with current AI architectures.

The truth is that the qwerty keyboard is not significantly slower than the Dvorak. It just reduces jamming on a mechanical typewriter.

I am wary when some expert tries to make a point using some ridiculous myth that was debunked decades ago. He could have just googled it, and seen that he was wrong.

In the video, Keating shares another classic bit of "technological lock-in" lore, claiming that modern railroad gauges (the distance between the tracks) can be traced back to the width of a Roman chariot, which was designed to fit two horses' butts.

While it’s a great story for a podcast, historians and engineers generally categorize this as a "spurious correlation"—it's mostly a myth, though it has a tiny thread of logic.

The Fact vs. The Fiction

• The Claim: Roman chariots created ruts in European roads. Wagons were built to fit those ruts so they wouldn't break their wheels. Early tramways used those same wagon dimensions, and English trains followed suit, eventually leading to the Standard Gauge (4 feet 8.5 inches) used in the U.S. and much of Europe.

• The Reality: While the standard gauge is roughly the width of an ancient wagon, the specific measurement of 4' 8.5" was actually popularized by George Stephenson, the "Father of Railways." He chose it because it was the width of the existing pre-steam coal tramways in North England where he worked.

• The "Horse's Butt" Part: There is no evidence that Romans measured horses' rear ends to build chariots. Chariots were built to be wide enough to hold two people and stable enough not to tip over. The fact that two horses fit in front of that width is a matter of practical spacing, not a design blueprint that dictated the Space Shuttle's dimensions (another common layer of this myth).

Why Keating Uses It

Keating’s broader point at isn't necessarily about Roman history; he's using it to explain Path Dependence. He argues that once a standard is set—whether it's QWERTY keyboards, railroad widths, or GPU-based AI architectures—it becomes "locked in" because the cost of changing the entire infrastructure is too high, even if a better way exists.

He is probably also wrong with his predictions about AI architectures. He also compares AI to a cockroach, and I think his point is that our AIs could suffer a technological lock-in at a sub-cockroach lever.

I assume that Keating is more accurate when he talks about cosmology experiments. But he says this:

0:30 If you said there's one galaxy, you're stupid. If you said there's one planet, you're stupid. If you said there's one. So why say there's one universe?

I am sticking to one universe. Maybe I am stupid.

WSJ Hypes Quantum Computers

new WSJ article has a glowing account of the future of quantum computing:

Microsoft, International Business Machines, Google and a host of other tech companies are in a race to disrupt the nature of computing.

Collectively in the U.S., these companies have spent hundreds of millions in the past few years to develop a new type of computer—known as a quantum computer—that leverages the principles of quantum physics to solve problems far beyond the capabilities of today’s best supercomputers.

And the companies say they could do it in the next two to five years.

When this point is reached, some problems that would take a traditional computer more than trillions of years to solve could take a quantum computer mere minutes, changing business as usual for industries involved with financial trading, shipping logistics, pharmaceuticals, scientific discovery, data encryption, insurance, internet delivery and more.

No, none of this is going to happen in five years.

It gives the usual explanation, even though Dr. Quantum Supremacy hates it:

A quantum computer, however — because of entangled qubits’ ability to calculate many probabilities at once — can evaluate all options simultaneously.

He says this is misleading, because if that were true, then the quantum computer could solve NP complete problems like the traveling salesman problem.

The article is paywalled. It has some nice graphics, if you can get it.

Dr. Bee Pushes Spooky Action and Superdeterminism

Sabine Hossenfelder posted a new video on causality.

I want to talk today about an issue that bothers me a lot, it’s that most physicists believe the speed of light is an ultimate, absolute, and impossible to overcome limit. Indeed, I think it is THE biggest mistake that physicists are making, that our entire species is making. ... 11:45 I am making this video to save mankind from its biggest mistake

Causality is the idea that if events A and B are separated, then A can only affect B by some sort of signal or interaction being transmitted from A to B. Relativity realizes this by putting a non-euclidean geometry on spacetime, so that everything propagates at the speed of light or slower.

She goes on the explain how she believes in the arrow of time, but that faster-than-light signals ought to be possible. She says we should not be constrained by relativity, because we know it is wrong.

2:14 I don’t know any physicist who thinks that Einstein’s theories are ultimately correct because they don’t include quantum effects, we are missing a theory of quantum gravity. So why should the limitation of the non-quantum theory continue to hold when we know it ultimately isn’t correct?

No, we are very sure the non-euclidean local structure of spacetime is correct. Her hypothetical quantum gravity only applies to the first second of the big bang and the center of a black hole, both far outside any scientific observation.

Next she talks about entanglement. Just where you might expect her to say that entanglement proves spooky action at a distance, she correctly explains that it does not.

This is the supposed non-locality. You make 9:51 a measurement here and you infer information about the properties of something elsewhere. This is nonlocal in some sense, but there is no information actually traveling anywhere, it’s just that you learned something about what is going on elsewhere. And this is the only way in which quantum physics is non-local. ... Because the measurement doesn’t affect the probability of either of the measurement outcomes.

This point trips up many physicists. The measurement does affect your knowledge, and hence how you calculate your expectations, but does not violate the causality being limited by the speed of light.

Then she goes off the rails.

11:53 It’s like this. Suppose that you think the collapse of the wavefunction is NOT a physical process. That actually the particles did have some specific state before you measured them, you just don’t know which. This is what’s called a “hidden variables theory”. In the simplest case the hidden variable just directly encodes which side is up. And the only way to make a hidden variables theory compatible with Einstein’s theory is by using what has been called “superdeterminism”.

Superdeterminism is the only local explanation for all the observations of quantum physics. This is why I think it’s trivially correct, and I am waiting for the rest of physicists to wake up to that. Which means that now we are properly crossing over into the range where most physicists would try to disagree with me, meaning they would be wrong. Physicists have mostly dismissed superdeterminism because of social reinforcement. The majority doesn’t even know how it works, they never thought about it, they just heard someone else say it’s wrong and they decided to believe this.

When she assumes that the particles had some "specific state", she means that the state could be completely described by hidden variables. Such hidden variables contradict quantum mechanics, and that is why no one believes in them.

When she says superdeterminism is the only local explanation for quantum observations, what she really means is that it is the only local hidden variable explanations. That is just a fancy way of saying that quantum mechanics is not a classical theory. Everyone has agreed to that for a century.

If you did believe in a hidden variable theory, as well as local causality, then she is correct that you are led to superdeterminism. Physicists dismiss it because it is philosophically absurd, anti-science, and no one knows how it would work. I have criticized it several times, such as here.

Another new video lists 10 Theories That Suggest Our Universe Is Not Real. It describes simulations and Boltzman brains, but superdeterminism is not respectable enough to make the list.

Quantum Crypto Wins Turing Award

Quanta magazine announces:

Bennett and Brassard have now been named the winners of the A.M. Turing Award, one of the highest honors in computing, for “their essential role in establishing the foundations of quantum information science and transforming secure communication and computing.” The award comes with a $1 million prize.

No, they did not transform secure communications. Their work has no practical applications.

Scott Aaronson says:

This is the first-ever Turing Award specifically for quantum stuff (though previous Turing Award winners, including Andy Yao, Leslie Valiant, and Avi Wigderson, have had quantum among their interests).

As a practical proposal, BB84 is already technologically feasible but has struggled to find an economic niche, in a world where conventional public-key encryption already solves much the same problem using only the standard Internet—and where, even after scalable quantum computers become able to break many of our current encryption schemes, post-quantum encryption (again running on the standard Internet) stands ready to replace those schemes. Nevertheless, as an idea, BB84 has already been transformative, playing a central role in the birth of quantum information science itself.

The BB84 protocol suffers several technical flaws.

The most important thing in secure communications is authentication. This is currently done with digital signatures and certificates, using RSA or ECDSA. This underlies everything. It is the most important part of ubiquitous protocols like https and ssh. But the quantum crypto cannot do it. That makes it useless for anything serious.

The next fatal defect is that it depends on hardware quirks. You have to have analog equipment that may or may not have the required precision, and may have analog vulnerabilities. This makes is subject to hardware attacks.

This makes is vastly inferior to the math-based crypto methods, because the math is not subject to hardware attacks. If a digital crypto device outputs bits that do not have the desired voltage or frequency, no info is leaked.

Another flaw is that the main BB84 security guarantee is that an attacker can probably be detected, so that transmission can be terminated. This has no value. In today's internet, systems get attacked all the time, and no one wants to shut down a communication because it is being attacked. Conventional cryptosystems are designed to be immune to such attacks.

Another flaw is that the internet is run on millions of routers. Using quantum crypto requires that all those routers be quantum computer routers. The quantum router has not even been invented, and even if it is possible, it will never be economical or have the necessary throughput.

All this has been known for decades, and that is why no one uses it, except for a few research demo projects.