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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday May 31 2017, @01:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the quantum-of-blockchain dept.

The Russian Quantum Center today announced it has overcome the threat of quantum cryptography by creating the first quantum-safe blockchain, securing cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, along with classified government communications and other sensitive digital transfers.

The center said the technology has been successfully tested by one of Russia's largest banks, Gazprombankm, and that the center is now working to expand the capability to other Russian and international financial services organizations.

The announcement was greeted with a wait-and-see attitude by industry observers, including HPC analyst Steve Conway, of Hyperion (formerly IDC), who noted that, given the complexity of the use case, neither the press release nor the white paper issued by the Russian Quantum Center provided enough technical detail to validate its announcement.

"As far as the use case goes," Conway said, "it's pretty universally acknowledged that one of the key early uses for quantum computing is going to be for cyber defense, so that's no surprise. Efforts like that are underway around the world. It's difficult to assess this one in comparison with any other without having any technical details about what they're doing."

Source:

https://www.hpcwire.com/2017/05/25/russian-researchers-claim-first-quantum-safe-blockchain/


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 31 2017, @03:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 31 2017, @03:22PM (#518325)

    Well, unless you give details of how your blockchain works, nobody can prove and disprove anything about it.

    Meanwhile, quantum computing, no matter whether we will ever be able to actually implement it in a scalable way, is well-defined and therefore one can prove claims about what it can do. Those are mathematical truths, and therefore independent of the question of physical implementation. Whether we ever will be able to implement non-trivial quantum computing, or even whether it is possible in principle, will not change any of those truths; it only changes their relevance (if you cannot implement a quantum computer, you of course don't care whether it could break your encryption).

    Note that even unimplementable computation mechanisms are useful in analysing problems with practical relevance. For example, we don't believe it is possible to build a non-deterministic Turing machine (that's a Turing machine that guesses at some steps, but has the magical property that it always guesses right). Yet the class of problems it can efficiently solve is of high importance (ever heard the term NP? That's exactly the class of problems a non-deterministic Turing machine can solve efficiently).