Google has created a quantum chip called Willow, which is being considered a huge success, even Elon Musk said Wow. We will see what this quantum chip is and will it be able to solve real world problems and what threats it can pose to today's big technologies like Blockchain, Cryptocurrency and Cryptography?
If we talk about quantum computers, the most important thing in it is a Qubit, as in classical and modern computing, Bits are used, which can get 0 and 1 values, they are made physically through transistors. Qubits are used in quantum computing and there are three methods for how qubits are made physically, in which
1. Ion Trap method
2. Photon Polarization method
3. Superconducting Materials
The third method is used relatively more.
Currently, Google has used the same Superconducting Materials method to make quantum chips. When this chip was tested (benchmarking), it gave surprising results. The most surprising thing is that usually whenever the number of qubits are increased inside a quantum computer, a lot of errors start appearing in its results, but as the number of qubits were increased inside Google's quantum chip, the errors in its results kept decreasing, which is a very welcoming that shows a new dimension in the future of quantum computing.
Along with the increasing error rates in quantum computers due to the increasing number of qubits, there is another problem that quantum computers that work on Quantum States, which include superposition and quantum entanglement, it is very difficult to protect these states from the vibration, radiation and temperature of the external environment. This problem is called decoherence. The quantum processor is kept at a very low temperature because it is very sensitive to temperature, so it is kept at Cryogenic Temperature, that is, close to Absolute Zero.
Now let's see what was tested on Google's Willow quantum chip, through which it was found that it is so powerful. Random Circuit Sampling was tested on it, this is a benchmark that is used to test the powers of quantum computers and if today's modern supercomputers are given this problem, they will need as much time to get results as the age of this universe.
This RCS is actually a mathematical model in which a difficult problem is created with quantum gates and qubit inputs and given to the quantum computer to solve it. Willow solved the benchmark used in this particular Google test in less than 5 minutes, but today's modern supercomputers would need 10 to the power of 25 years (10 septillion years), which is much longer than the age of the universe (10 to the power of 10).
But this is not proof that this quantum chip will be ready for today's real mathematical problems right away. This is just a prototype because it has only 105 qubits inside and to compete with today's supercomputers, it is necessary to have about a million qubits.
Now we will talk about whether cryptography and blockchain or cryptocurrency can be threatened by this quantum chip.
All the modern cryptography (encryption decryption) algorithms that are currently available are considered very secure. Today's modern computers are not capable of breaking these algorithms. In addition, the Hashing (SHA-256) used in Blockchain technology is such that even supercomputers will need many days or months to break it. But can quantum computing be dangerous for these technologies?
So the answer is "no" for now because the one hundred and five qubits that this chip will make, in which the error rates are also decreasing, are not yet capable of breaking modern cryptography or blockchain technology because it will require at least one million qubits, which is not possible for the next ten or twenty years because there are still many problems in it that will be solved before a commercial quantum computer can be seen. But it is possible and all the big technology companies are busy developing quantum cryptography or post-quantum cryptography regarding cybersecurity.
Elon Musk has always been a critic of Google, but this time he was impressed and said "wow", then Sundar Pichai also responded and offered to bring about a revolution in space through quantum computers.
