Will China’s Photon Supercomputer Destroy Bitcoin?

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A strange juxtaposition in the Chinese and American press these past few days with Bitcoin in the middle. According to the South China Morning Post earlier this week, the Beijing government was proud to report that it has built a computer machine “one trillion times faster” than any rival. Forbes, the US business magazine, responded that the fact that China would have quantum supremacy could be harmful for many businesses, not at least for trading bots and miners of Bitcoin. The British newspaper Financial Times agreed.

Jiuzhang

A paper published in Science this week set the whole discussion off. Apparently China has now built a quantum computer that has an advantage using photons. The Chinese researches proudly claimed that

This achievement firmly established our country’s leading position in international quantum computing research.

The blockchain researchers of Deloitte responded to the news by pointing out the possible danger that the supercomputers could mean for Bitcoin, saying:

Quantum computers are posing a serious challenge to the security of the bitcoin blockchain.

Quantum computers might eventually become so fast that they will undermine the bitcoin transaction process. In this case the security of the bitcoin blockchain will be fundamentally broken.

With both Google and the Chinese government now possessing such a supercomputer capable of doing this, many claim that it is only a matter of time before Beijing could decide what is more important: it’s own Digital Yuan or Bitcoin? In order to protect the former, President Xi Jinping could theoretically decide to destroy the latter.

However, Forbes think we are getting ahead of ourselves and believes that, for now, Bitcoin is still safe.