Cryptocurrency V God The future of ethereum needs to deal with the quantum challenge
Last week, Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ether, talked about the future of blockchains widely used for various crypto projects.Vitalik Buterin said that the future of the Ether blockchain and crypto ETH is bright, but there are still many challenges that need to be addressed [1], including quantum computing.
01Vitalik Buterin and the cryptocurrency myth
The virtual currency craze has swept the world in recent years. Ethereum is an open source, public blockchain platform with smart contract capabilities that allows users to trade on the ethereum network through a dedicated cryptocurrency, Ether (ETH). It is currently the second highest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, with Bitcoin in first place, both of which are cryptocurrencies derived from blockchain-based technology.
Vitalik Buterin (V-God), the founder of Ether, is known as the spiritual leader of the cryptocurrency community: at the age of 24, he surpassed Jack Ma ($40.8 billion) and became the youngest cryptocurrency billionaire [2].
Vitalik Buterin received his first computer at the age of 4, then advanced to programming at the age of 5-6; his family immigrated from Russia to Canada at the age of 6, where he enrolled in a class for gifted children and became known as a "math genius"; he enrolled in the University of Waterloo at the age of 19, but dropped out after 8 months to devote himself to blockchain technology research. In 2014, Buterin launched a public fundraising campaign, successfully raising funds and founding the Ether Blockchain platform.
Earlier, TIME released its first full magazine in NFT format, featuring Vitalik Buterin on the cover, talking about the future of cryptocurrencies in an exclusive interview.
The talk was a warm-up for the "Ether 2.0 Project" to be held in September, where Vitalik Buterin opened up about the future of blockchain for various crypto projects.
02"Ether developers will face the threat of quantum computing"
Vitalik said that developers of Ether should be ready to face the threat of quantum computing, which is expected to grow exponentially in the rate of computing power.
Quantum computing is considered a major threat to current blockchain technologies, including Bitcoin, with related discussions starting four years ago. Because at that time, quantum computing technology underwent a major development: it was shown to be able to compute very complex calculations in just 10 minutes; with today's supercomputers, it could take thousands of years.
Quantum computing will compute millions of times faster than today's supercomputers and is expected to continue to improve in the future, making it easier for humans to get their work done.
The problem is that the smarter quantum computers get, the more they can threaten current human cryptographic security systems, including the current Bitcoin blockchain, which uses SHA256.
In 2021, Vitalik noted this huge potential of quantum computing, and while the power of the new computers is not a threat now, it will be a huge hidden danger in the future. This is because quantum computing promises a new world of derived technologies, but also poses a threat to traditional technologies. That's exactly what happened when the first supercomputers were developed.
"We are currently working with several artificial intelligence researchers to develop new algorithms that can compete with the high performance of quantum computing. This is still a long process, taking as long as 10-30 years from now." Vitalik said.
03Quantum truly threatens cryptocurrencies, also still needs time
Not only V-God, but in recent years, many people have been worried about the risk of quantum computing breaking current crypto systems. The Bitcoin network, which currently uses 256-bit elliptic curve encryption (ECC), is also exposed to the risk, so how many quantum bits would it take to crack Bitcoin?
In January, an AVS Quantum Science paper [3] published by researchers in the UK and the Netherlands showed that cracking Bitcoin encryption in one hour would require a machine with 317 million quantum bits. Even if the encryption is broken in one day, this number only drops to 13 million quantum bits.
The number of physical quantum bits required to break the Bitcoin 256 elliptic curve encryption has a fixed maximum runtime. The number of quantum bits is a function of the code cycle time and the underlying physical error rate.
Using a surface code with code cycle time = 1 μs, reaction time = 10 μs, and physical gate error rate = 10-3, it would take about 317 million physical quantum bits to break the encryption in one hour. In addition, 13 million physical quantum bits are required to break the encryption in one day. If the underlying physical error rate is a more optimistic 10-4, 33 million physical quantum bits would be required to break the encryption in 1 hour. This huge demand for physical quantum bits means that the Bitcoin network will be immune to quantum computing attacks for many years (possibly more than 10 years).
Earlier this year, QANplatform, a quantum-resistant Layer 1 hybrid blockchain platform, launched its test network (testnet), becoming the first Ethernet-compatible, quantum-resistant blockchain platform. While the quantum threat may seem far away, it is time to get ready.
Reference link:
[1]https://nationworldnews.com/vitalik-buterin-the-future-of-ethereum-eth-and-the-challenge-of-quantum-computing-nation-world-news/
[2]https://www.harpersbazaar.com.hk/lifestyle/vitalik-buterin
[3]https://avs.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1116/5.0073075
