Quantum Doom Vs. Quantum Optimism. Web3: Preparing for the Future of Cryptography and Technology

I guess John is like Santa Claus he arrives when he arrives right so okay cool so uh I just wanted to start with uh also for for for the crowd with a uh statistics basically uh how many of you uh identify like uh in the quantum doomers party like you are more concerned about security than I'm a Believer in kind of the Doom scenario because if we don't recognize it we can't prepare for it and when everybody has their head in the sand then it makes the Doom more likely so I don't think it's absolutely going to happen I just think that if we don't prepare for it it will happen but if we do prepare for it we can move along you know and survive the scenario yeah uh I agree with uh with your points um I think we need to be prepared for the worst uh and optim is there as well um but we we need to to think about what could be wrong and uh uh start to to work on that we have some time uh it will not happen tomorrow but uh we need to be really really uh careful with uh our new uh technology we use from AI to um to or or this kind of new technology very distruptive technology and so we it's all about know what we we are talking about and what was is coming and if we proper well nothing can really happen well this is a new technology every technology brings change that is normal that's kind of the point of it we get good things we get bad things we know what the road is we know that we have some Primitives that work uh we know that we can start swapping the current cryptographic Primitives for new ones so we should just start doing that there are challenges this is not something that will be doable within a day a month maybe even a year there are some technical things to do that are new but this is not a change that will come next year this is a change that might come in two years might come in five years might come in seven years the question is not really oh I'm it's not coming next year it's not coming in two years most likely so I won't do anything about it it's about risk and reward if there is a probability that what 5% that this will come in 2026 you multiply that by the amount of money that will be wiped out if we don't prepare and you know that's the cost so it is a new technology and personally I think it is something to be amazed by it is an incredible technological feat it brings challenges we should just you know get moving and prepare for it so we can get the best out out of it rather than just be scared of what it might change okay um John can you explain sorry Yan can you expl as lap four hours yesterday guys sorry uh Yan can you explain uh in layan terms what is BLS and why it keeps you awake at night so BLS is a technique that's used on both the lightning Network and the salana network and you know in some ways on the network but lightning and salana rely on it exclusively there's if they don't have it they're they're dead um it takes a lot of signatures combines them into a single fixed size uh signature to check if that one signature is valid then all of the signatures are valid and it's this great way of just saying it doesn't matter how big the problem space is doesn't matter how many signatures there are to check I'm going to spend the same you know one tenth of a second and I can check a million signatures or five million signatures or 10 so it's this great technology for making it very easy to check lots of people at the same time if any one of them is lying then the result comes up false and then you have to recheck them individually or groups of them uh so it's this amazing technology for aggregating data verifying it all in one go and then knowing that it's correct and no one's uh submitted false data or had errors in Ram and why does it keep keep you awake at night it's not there's nothing like that in postquantum cryptography so we uh do not have anything that has the same performance capabilities checking signal single postquantum signatures is usually like three and a half seconds and normally you have to check all of them individually there are some really expensive ways of getting a slight reduction in that so it scales better than you know linear but uh there isn't anything to transition you know lightning and Salon too we don't have the mathematical Primitives if we do get them that's that's great but we should still check them for at least three years before we actually used them for anything of value or we were just gambling essentially so the reason it keeps me awake is that we're just basically going to have to cross off large sections of Hy performant uh crypto uh and transition to very slow crypto and some other technique probably sharting okay thank you um Lucas as a entrepreneur working in the web Tre space what is that you are looking for from pantum Hardware producers are you like talking with them or what kind of metrics are you following that I think are relevant for what you're do yeah uh we we we are working with them obviously to see how far we are uh from from the day will happen or really happen um we discuss most likely with most intelligent uh committee different governments to know uh how the threat and how it will come and when it will come uh have the best Insight in term of I think consum threat because they will be the first uh uh to um to be attacked by consum Computing to have access to really sensitive data and and sensitive information so we know we are not that far of the first attack uh but there is a few times between it will become massive and every organization will be touched it's not until couple of years but the first government will be really fast thank you Stefano can you explain like in layman terms what contextuality is okay I I will have 15 minutes to do this so I might I might take all of the additional time that I possibly have um the idea is that there are things that you can do with Quantum devices which don't necessarily mean quantum computers they can be smaller simpler we can manufacture most of them the small ones today with current Quantum technology there are things you can do that you can't do classically that are literally impossible classically so there's new opportunities um you may or may not have heard of bells theorem or no locality these are Notions uh in Quantum in Quantum information the idea is that you can perform certain experiments where you measure two Quantum particles and you obtain some outcomes some bits zero and one from these particles and then you look at the distribution these bits are random and you ask could I have foreseen them is this something that could I be fooled by someone into thinking that I'm doing a Quantum experiment but really I have some classical simulator or a small Gadget that does it for me and the answer for well designed experiments is no so that's the idea of contextuality you have some data that you can observe that cannot be reconciled or glued together into a picture where you can predict it fully or even partially so you get intrinsic Randomness effectively Randomness that cannot be hacked Randomness that cannot be replicated or predicted and you can start saying this is a noo result which is what it originally was it was inspired by discussion from Einstein uh and uh collaborators early in the past Century and then in the 60s B demonstrated that this was impossible but really in more recent years we got to the point where we realized that well I'm saying we but people much smarter than me realized that this Randomness can be used for cryptographic purposes because it is secure in a certain sense no one can predict it therefore no one can really hack it once you have it if you keep it private it's Randomness that's private and you can use it to make keys you can use it to share secrets the challenge really is finding good shapes of Randomness for good cryptographic applications that's the thing that scan missing we know some of them because we've discovered them by hand over the years but there is quite a lot more waiting and not a lot of people are working on it yet um yeah it's a it's a very promising res contextuality is a resource it's a cryptographic resource that you don't have classically you can do new things genuinely new things thank you uh Ian again we are probably going into contentious territory right now but uh what is like I know you've been following um you know the quantum road map by the etherum foundation and what vital commented about it and and stuff like that um what what are your opinions about that and probably more importantly is there some kind of form of Engagement from the EF on the matter that you would like to see I would love to see tons of Engagement um the plan that felic proposed this year year is to wait for the quantum attack to already break ethereum and then to rewind ethereum and all of the layer 2s and all of the bridges and all of the databases and all of the DBS and Bitcoin and any other proof of work system to a previous state in time where the attack hadn't occurred I don't think that's going to happen then he wants to delete everybody's wallets and that's pretty dangerous um the way that he proposed things to work is that uh you just get rid of all multisig that uh doesn't come from a wallet you get rid of basically all custodial wallets and then you simply use the Demonic phrase only proven into a ZK Stark because they're based off sha 256 and we keep sha 256 and I think that this uh fundamentally breaks the ecosystem to to such an extent that the damage would be uh a death blow if it was implemented whether or not you know it actually Sal saves anything it's a death blow to the economy to the trust uh to the community and we need better plans and better communication from the EF to number one prepare correctly because most people don't even have their pneumonic phrases now um and also we need to come up with a better plan and that better plan can only be found by consensus in the oldfashioned way sitting down and talking with each other and with the community and with researchers and experts to really discuss what the different plans look like so I'm kind of trying uh to create a nonprofit that does just that for every change just what are our plans what are the options how much does it hurt what is necessary to make that uh occur and is there a better path and do that for every chain every uh not consensus mechanism but for every method of you know establishing a network communication and a ledger and there's there's different opportunities and different challenges for every chain like Bitcoin needs opcat ethereum had an opportunity for account abstraction but they let it go it slipped through their fingers so now what we don't know we just have a plan of rewinding everything and then burning the rest uh I think that ethereum Foundation needs to be a lot more public about their plans and a lot more uh asking questions instead of just having a really really uh heavy-handed approach and the Bitcoin Community has basically said the same thing like that heavy-handed approach will not work for Bitcoin and it may not work for ethereum either but I don't think that a heavy-handed approach is the appropriate one we really need to form consensus uh one of my mentors was Paul mapus head of the ietf for a dozen years and he wrote DNS he said that if it's worth implementing it's worth talking about if you don't talk about it then you don't know what the shape of the problem is and he's was the head of the internet engineering Task Force at the time that the internet was created and became popular I think he's right okay thank you um Lucas you mentioned in your talk that uh n is collaborating with uh universities all over the world and you know that you are producing research and and papers can can you elaborate a bit on how your research looks like internally what kind of problems you focus on the most yeah um we we're focusing on do some research about uh post consume and how it will fit with the blockchain technology uh and the use case of Po consume encryption into uh real organization critical structures Banks uh we are working with uh two University in Portugal uh to pH and and their student uh on on C search we are working with the mate in us as well uh to see um the limit of the post consum technology and the blockchain generally uh we try to uh we we did some uh papers on a new potential consensus of validation uh more efficient and more secure uh we uh it's it's really technological research uh on the use cases as well uh and how critical infrastructure will be impact in the next 10 years about uh the new technology from AI to Edge Computing uh and the decentralized physical infrastructure uh it's a big topic uh this years uh for us uh to how will decentralize GPU CPU um and uh storage and how we can create seamless um technology for uh uh to be the most resilient and the most efficient in the same time which is a big challenge uh we all know about the the blockchain tra in in what we try to solve this as University uh and and scale create application that could be scale for one and for the MTH uh in P of other organization we we help for This research thank you um Stefano you told us about what contextuality is now the question is is it true uh and how is it true if it's true that uh contextuality infrastructure needs a different kind of Hardware with respect like Universal quantum computers people are working on is it more feasible more hard to produce what's what's the state of of the art there yeah so there are two kinds of uh challenges with Quantum Computing one of them is to actually make matter do computations that is in itself not easy it is easy for small computations perhaps you can always just put a filter on a fiber optic line that does in a sense an ation or a gate um classical Optics does that um the hard part is to do it with a lot very large Quantum State a lot of cubits for a long time and that's what the challenge of quantum Computing today is universal Quantum Computing I should say because there are other forms of quantum Computing that's hard it's hard because of scale it's hard because of the time that it takes to do the operations and the very short time that this particles live or well the very short time that they retain their quantumness in a sense protocols in Quantum cryptography and Quantum information are very different in that sense all they need is distance and very limited amounts of computation typically just the choice of where to measure a particle that's enough to do a lot of interesting things already and so you can do them with slight modification on existing classical Optics Hardware so if you have fiber optic if you have a very good fiber optic Network you can probably adapt it to carry Quantum states by just using photons photons are excellent carriers of quantum State they live very long they don't interact with anything else to the point that we see photons coming from 15 like billion years ago in the sky they just come to us they've been traveling since the time of last scuttering they're still entangled with the partners that were formed they've retained their state for all this time surely we can do it for a few seconds the hard that you need to do the computation is easier we can do some of it today it just requires a bit of you know engineering advancement to make it to make it uh good Fidelity so that you get high key rates that's the challenge is to make this compatible or competitive with classical cryptography we're used in keys that are generated in the megabits or gigabits per second uh if you do an experiment in Quantum on a tabletop you generate bits per second perhaps that's it uh so you have to do it right but it is something that we could do if we decided that we want to explore that side of computing it is a lot cheaper than Universal Quant Computing because we already have a lot of the infrastructure it's more about finding the applications that's the hard part thank you uh question for all of you uh do you have any opinions or interesting insights about what is quantum memory what's the state of it why is it useful why people should know what it is and stuff like that I'll give it the bad answer first because the experts are at the at the end here so I'll give the bad answer Quantum memory is like water that's going down a hill and you need to have the information carried and then you retrieve it at the right time the faster the water goes the more computation you can get out of it but you need to use more to retrieve it at the right time it's a it's a really flawed analogy but the idea is you actually get more utility out of slow memory but then the rest of your device is also slow so there's this like performance gain that you can get but you lose it when you actually use it there's also um there's a a bunch of ideas about using silicon uh for both filtering and for memory uh and most of these things are are cursed in one way or another it's really hard to get the information loaded in from the Silicon into the quantum system and then to load that state at the precisely right time um so they have like a whole bunch of extra Machinery just associated with well maybe we can Loop it sort of but you can't really Loop it because you can't do the same thing twice in a Quantum system it it would be the end of the universe if we could just it would all go to entropy um I think that's accurate uh so it's basically trying to hold information as it's slipping through your fingers and you have to keep grabbing more and more of it and the faster you grab the more you have to grab yeah I pretty agree with uh with what you said uh internet we have the debate uh if um uh we saw the poal potential of that but uh uh it it came with a dilemma with the performance uh So currently we we try to be the most efficient and have the the most performant system um so overall it's uh it come with a good and go with a bad uh currently uh I think is uh it's surely one of the aspect of the consum computer there is the most progress to do it uh to improve and find a solution to be uh uh more efficient using it uh that using other system that works pretty well um but in five years will be another debate for sure yeah so perhaps it is worth giving a bit of an overview of why it is is hard because it might not be entirely obvious that it is a very very hard thing to do the idea is you want to keep a Quantum State Quantum not a bit so it has to be something else you have many ways of doing this I mean you can have a bit of superc conducting circuit where the state is encoded on a super conducting current that loops around you can have a photon photons are nice carriers you can have an atom it's excited and its excitation level carries a Quantum State you can have many things the problems are twofold really depends on which side of the technology you pick if you pick photons photons are absolutely great they keep their state forever but they travel very very fast they have a tendency not to stand still in fact you can't make them stand still almost at all and so the only way to really keep photons confined is to have either something that absorbs and repeats them but that process is even slightly flawed even like a one in a million imperfection the photon travels a lot between the two end points of your receiver it will bounce billions of times before you can use it maybe more so you will almost certainly lose its state in this way the other way is to make a very big loop of fiber optic or a chip that has a very long path on it and that works better in a sense but is also a bit lossy every time it reflects against the side of the fiber optic or against the side of the chip um path you have a very very small probability because of imperfections that the photon will be lost and so because photons travel really fast and bounce really fast uh that accumulates really quickly over time and you don't have a long a long life for the other kind of Technologies it's mostly that the world is hot like very hot um and by hot I mean it's hotter than absolute zero which would be perfect and so for some of these Technologies you have to cool things down to 10,000 of a degree above absolute zero in part because you want super conducting effects which happened there but in part because every time you have a heat heat is a soup of photons these photons have a chance of interacting with your Quantum States if they are of the correct energy they have a very high chance of interacting and they carry away the information one Bounce from one Photon from the heat bath around your computer is enough to screw one cubit and this so you have to lower the probability that this happens which means you have to cool things quite a lot quite a little and so it's hard to find a technology that is both something that you could use at actual room temperature or that you could carry around in your pocket in a ledger and at the same time keeps a Quantum state for any longer than a few micros seconds these days we are actually up to seconds I think which is incredible which is incredible like two years ago it was micro now it's seconds so it's improving but I think as long as you don't have Universal Quantum Computing this is going to be a challenge with universal Quantum computing you can do what what you described earlier you can just continue to correct you it's going to try to slip you catch it and you put it back and you try to fix the errors again and again and again but that requires a very big machine so it's not something that we can do right now I mean maybe in a year or two but only for very few cubits and definitely not in your pocket so there are some advancements that need to be made here if we don't have if we don't want to have the Quantum Internet that distributes these particles on the Fly which by the way is an option we need to do better on Quantum memory but people are working on it quite quite hard so it gives the wrong Vibes heat gives the wrong Vibes heat heat gives literally the wrong in VI modes yeah yes yes yes literally the wrong Vibes um okay cool um I would say maybe last question which is not really a question so um this is like super early right like the interaction between Quantum and and web tree Tech I don't say Quantum and crypto because this is one of those contexts where crypto can really is really in a superposition of the word cryptography and the word cryptocurrency so that is possibly the worst pick at the moment when I say Quantum crypto is like doesn't make anything clear so uh it's super early for Quantum and web tree Tech interaction it's a super early space and I think very few people know about this right now uh obviously many people that built a knowledge uh in Quantum Computing maybe lack knowledge in web tree technology and many people that built knowledge in web tree like I guess many of the attendees of an event like this probably have never really approached uh Quantum Computing um maybe they read read something but I wouldn't expect that there are many cross-domain experts so if you were to like go back uh what what kind of path would you suggest is the best one for people to build information and start you know knowing more about this world like literally okay I I played in ethereum for like a couple of years now these things come up come up what do I do okay um no that's a very good question um uh the thing with blockchain is way more easy to learn about blockchain that consume consume computer or consume physic U but everything related to uh to consume in overall is it's kind of private for now it's it's OD we need to be in some very specific University is or uh very big uh group big Enterprise uh to to have the chance to work on consume um so blockchain was easier for uh everyone to learn about that about what some even the technical part of blockchain about encryption uh smart contract uh and and that's true as well in the other side from Kum they didn't really learn about how blockchain Works encryption model using blockchain and how everything could be compatible uh to boost EV of research uh boost the data management overall uh boost the hardware requirement uh and I think both could be really compatible uh and uh um if you are a blockchain Enthusiast start looking about consum and what will happen in the next five years uh because uh uh we we saw recently the the the disruption of AI but consum will be even bigger uh because the research in time of pharmaceutical or medical or technology will be way way faster uh and I think consum in the mid long term will be combined with AI and create a real AGI uh what we should be afraid of that by the way uh that's not really the talk of today but uh AI in blockchain should match in the future uh we should see more consume application bridging uh blockchain perspective and AI uh AI model into connected to that to boost uh even the research and consumer Hardware uh we could there is a couple of things to do right now uh but the overall the two are really compatible I think and there is a lot of common application even if we there is not a big Focus from the web free community right now on that uh but it will come in the next couple of month for sure so I I'd like to agree with what you said but um add quite a bit so I Define web 3 as JavaScript on a web page that goes to blockchain or some other kind of distributed Ledger and there's been a lot of like redefinitions and like uh people trying to do marketing around what is web 3 what is web fi what is this what is that and this is just part of their marketing gimmick and knowledge is a way to cut through the if you actually understand how these things work you'll be able to separate the from the reality in any topic and so you're just become more capable and well armed and able to figure out if someone's just trying to scam money out of you the the more you know the better off you are I I do think that there's a uh a lot of resource resources for Quantum and there's a lot more for blockchain but a lot of the blockchain resources are focused on the fluff you don't need to study consensus models um as long as you're using technology that has not too much Innovation if there's a lot of innovation in the consensus model you're adding the possibility of double spend yes you can spend many weeks studying consensus models I've spent months doing it but it has very little utility as long as they're not doing something crazy you don't need to know too much more about it uh the thing that really makes uh a lot of sense to study is Javascript on a web page reporting to a Smart contract learn a little bit about how the storage works because the storage is going to be different for each chain uh Cosmos has a different storage mechanism salana has a different storage mechanism uh ethereum you know has kind of like a a shining storage mechanism that was pretty welld designed but if you look at the problems that c is Created from the storage mechanisms you'll see that there people trying to solve those problems so theguy the limit on storage mechanisms but it's useless to study lots of consensus models for the interaction between Quantum I would suggest starting off at like the IBM uh guides you can start learning about Quantum algorithms you can program in Python to perform the quantum computation there's a bunch of uh new Computing centers that are you know ionq I think has one there's a bunch of places you can just run their quantum computer and they're all pretty much compatible with kis kit there's a few exceptions but kis Kit's the the main way to get started and it's it's python you can do uh d-wave programming with kis kit but it's d-wave is limited uh I think that there's a future for web 3 and Quantum to coexist when we have these uh Quantum key distribution networks like the one from um South Korea's SK Telecom uh the bank networks that are growing there's new networks that are being created uh those still need to communicate with the Silicon World in a trustless manner and blockchain is a really good bridge between those two systems so I think the blockchain web 3 and Quantum will actually pair together very well in the the next like one to three years and then there'll be more and more projects that are pairing them together in different ways so it makes sense to actually learn the depth of both but also to figure out you know when someone's just trying to shine you on and and trick you um in the case of quantum there is a lot to learn that's very strange very very bizarre uh the stuff I studied in physics in the 90s is just useless I had to start over and it is going to be months of study if you want to learn the the physics um and in this in my case I hired a Quantum physicist who specializes in algorithms as an adviser and I ask him questions on a regular basis to check my understanding and it's uh that's not going to be a very common resource that people will have but it's one of those things where when I'm on stage I feel like I have to get it right and if it's just your own understanding that you're risking then it's fine but if you're if you're the more money you're talking about investing into something that's postquantum the more you should ask people is this postquantum so I'm hoping to make that resource more available just having a forum or community that just focuses on the quantum versus web 3 what is the migration path uh but I've been just you know ripping apart white papers and sometimes I'll say this is a really good Tech but that's rare uh so there's a lot to study and it's worth doing Stefano yeah so yeah that's a hard question um there is there are two side of two sides of things one is the postquantum cryptography side of things where you really have to know what people can do in Quantum and the rest is really cryptography it's classical cryptography it's just cryptography that you have to know know is robust in some way if you're studying weaknesses you have to know what the state of the art is that is one challenge in itself um that is that requires you to read a certain kind of papers from a certain Community you have to keep up with Hardware manufacturers and have a good idea of what's feasible and what's not feasible that is hard for people in Quantum I imagine it's hard for people outside of quantum as well but more generally we have a ux problem in Quantum we have a huge problem it's the way that Quantum is presented is hard to approach it has been for many years it has been for a 100 years actually um it requires a certain mathematical background it requires certain training um luckily things have changed there are more modern languages there are more modern ways of approaching Quantum and you can learn enough to do sort of quantum enable cryptography contextuality no locality actually I would say within a few days days or maybe a week or two I certainly hope that my students pass their exams this time and um we will see no I know that I know that they do well typically so you can there are more modern methods um that you can use for this but we do have a problem we do have to make things more accessible uh we do have to build some tooling we have to offload some of the hard stuff to a computer it's otherwise it's like asking people to compute logarithms in their head why would you have to to do that you have a calculator same thing here why do you have to do contextuality computations in your head or by hand you don't have to there's standard mechanisms we can just build software to do that I think that's the first that's the start to make this more mainstream we need it to be approachable we need the parts that are confusing because they happen in Thousand Dimensions with millions of vertices we need those you know that's what a computer is good for not not our brains so we need to conceptualize it better we need to encapsulate it better but I I think we have plans for that yeah we do okay thank you very much uh I hope this was insightful and yeah I think that's it