- Google has announced a new quantum computing chip ‘Willow’
- They claim it is 1025 times faster than advanced supercomputers
- They also claim to exponentially reduce computational errors
- Some are starting to worry about the sustainability of cryptocurrencies again
On December 9, Google announced its new quantum computing chip ‘Willow’, and claimed impressive performance. Hartmut Neven, Google’s Quantum AI lead said that the new chip handles complex calculations 1,025 times faster than the latest supercomputers, while they have exponentially reduced the number of errors during the calculations.
Such news has once again led many to say that cryptocurrencies are under threat, as such computing capabilities could break encryption. Ava Labs founder and CEO Sirer says that while quantum computing is a big leap, it may raise concerns about Willow’s potential threat to crypto encryption.
More About Willow’s Potential Capabilities
Willow’s actual capabilities, and more importantly under what conditions they are applicable, have yet to be tested by researchers. At the moment we only have statements from Hartmut Neven, who expresses his admiration for the results they have achieved.
According to him, Willow performs complex computational tasks and finds solutions within 5 minutes, unlike other supercomputers that take a thousand quadrillion years to do so.
“This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe.”
However, those who understand quantum computing know that there is a fundamental problem. Instead of the usual bits – the quantum computer works with qubits, which can be in more states than 0 or 1. As the number of qubits increases, the computational capabilities of a quantum computer grow exponentially relative to classical computers, but at the same time, the errors in calculations grow exponentially.
Hartmut Neven also answered that the results continue to matter because Willow can exponentially correct errors while performing complex computations at astonishing speed. So, if this is what he really meant, and his statements are true, then Google was able to overcome a fundamental problem in an entire industry?
This naturally raises questions about how much we can rely on the current encryption methods that underpin many infrastructures, and cryptocurrencies as well.
Ava Labs founder and CEO Sirer commented on this, saying while quantum computing is a big leap, it may raise concerns about Willow’s potential threat to crypto encryption. While he doesn’t see a direct threat right now, he outlined concerns about Satoshi Nakamoto’s 1M Bitcoin, which used the outdated P2PK format.
However, Google senior product manager Kevin Rose cracked Bitcoin’s encryption, a quantum computer with around 13 million qubits would have to complete the task in 24 hours. Google’s Willow chip had only 105 qubits.
Conclusion
There are many ways to look at this. On the one hand, this isn’t the first and probably won’t be the last advance in the quantum computing industry, and each is inevitably accompanied by concerns about the sustainability of current encryption methods and everything that relies on them, including cryptocurrency. And perhaps we really should take care of these things before they come, since even a million transistors on a chip seemed an impossible task at the dawn of their emergence, and now they number in the trillions.
On the other hand, the nature of quantum computers is analog rather than digital, and more states than 0 and 1 will always create inaccuracies that will need to be dealt with separately. The more qubits, the more interference will have to be dealt with, and how efficient will all that power really be under those conditions?
