Quantum vs. Crypto: The Battle Royal

Almost fifty years ago a few young esoteric mathematicians brought to the world the intellectual milestone of public/private key cryptography, which over the last decades has taken society into cyberspace, enabling e-commerce, and assembling e-reality. When public/private cryptography was still an academic curiosity, a not so young physicist, Richard Feynman, imagined a computing machine based on quantum mechanics, replacing the Turing machine, which is based on classical mechanics. Forty years later Quantum computing looms as a death threat to public/private key cryptography. It’s like climate change, few mavens deny that quantum computing stands to kill public/private key cryptography, but the huge momentum enjoyed by public/private key cryptography stubbornly rejects the inevitable conclusions. Not only is e-commerce in time of pandemic a lifeline to billions, but a whole new industry bloomed for more than a decade now — crypto money. It galvanized millions with its vision of freedom and privacy. Hundreds of thousands of lines of code are written weekly taking crypto money full steam ahead.

And the quantum beast develops in the recesses of the halls of power: national laboratories are competing with corporate giants. A lot of technological hurdles, but the vision first articulated by Richard Feynman is breathtaking: parallel computing compared to classic sequential calculations. Public/Private key cryptography relies on the inability of classic computers to calculate faster than they do, and here comes a whole new class of computing machines and undermines the foundational premise of the technology that serves as the railroad for the journey to cyberspace.

Is public/private key cryptography doomed?

The third decade of the 21st century will witness the battle royal between Crypto and Quantum, between the technology that relies on mathematical complexity and the technology that dissolves it.

The course of history in decades ahead will be determined by the outcome of this battle royal.

And quite recently some good news came home from the front. The beleaguered public/private key cryptography learned a lesson from Covid-19. Fighting for its life against the wave of vaccines, this virulent virus resorted to Darwinian mutation. First was the Delta, now the Omicron, and the battle rages.

The leaders of this battle royal came to realize that all the 2000 or so crypto currencies suffer from the same vulnerability: algorithmic singularity. Each crypto coin relies on a publicly exposed complexity-generating algorithm, serving as a resting target for its attackers. It is just a question of time for a quantum machine to train its terrific power on that foundational algorithm. Once compromised the currency collapses.

Can crypto do what Covid does? Indeed a crypto saving solution just emerged: algorithmic mutation. Replacing the resting target crypto coin with a moving target crypto coin; building a coin that hinges on ever changing public/private key algorithms, to keep ahead of its predator.

More details: BitMint-LeVel