The Future is Quantum – Fabrizio Genovese

calls for the future yeah sure hello everyone cheers uh Matt can I move around or the cam will be sad if I do okay thank you I was I was there yesterday so you know I know the pain that's why I was asking okay so um basically this is this is something new uh it's a new narrative in crypto that has been brewing for a while but many people are not aware of it um you know when we organized naplet it was really really adamant that we had to have some Quantum talks so I'm I'm very glad that we got there and that we have a Quantum track in a crypto event so okay uh let me tell you a story let me begin with a story uh in 2025 uh the quantum treat looms closer people are increasingly [ __ ] their pants about you know cryptography being weak uh signatures uh being broken we don't have cryptographic alternatives to BLS elliptic Curve will will crash I mean everyone is basically panicking and obviously people will start asking what happens to my Bitcoin what happens to my assets what what do we do are we safe luckily there is a small group of people I would say that probably five over 10 people that work on this are in this room right now that is already working on fixing this problem so many people don't know yet but there is a lot of work happening uh you know behind the curtains to protect ourselves from this Quantum threat now in 2030 uh Quantum Computing keeps making progress and core infrastructure is is you know maybe Quantum resistant and people are not uh scared anymore uh of a Quantum threat so now that the quantum threat is gone people will be like okay cool but now that we defended against Quantum Computing what is that Quantum Computing can actually do for us like we we defended like we kept the status quo our assets are safe but is there something more that we can gain from this again again people have been at work and the study of nonlocality which is a Quantum thing we will heavily talk about in a subsequent talks and panel uh has made progress and now we start seeing the first genuinely Quantum Primitives that allow you to do stuff that wasn't possible before like Quantum wasal signatures Quantum novel Quantum money and other cryptographic protocols now in 2035 uh we will God willing uh have a Quantum Internet fairly established and we will probably have the first Quantum ledgers out so what is a Quantum Ledger it will probably be in the best of all words a device not bigger than this clicker basically like a ledger Nano that contains uh thousands if not tens of thousands of entangle cubits and it will allow you to sign and establish secure unfor unforgeable cryptography Channels with other parties with instantaneous communication so this will enable Quantum money and Quantum Mone is something very difficult to grasp for people working in crypto because it is like crypto but there is no consensus there is no Ledger it really works like cash you can privately and securely send it over far distances to people without needing a consensus protocol that is the central actor that keeps the book uh so exactly that's what we was saying and basically we will have uh an entirely Ledger lless infrastructure where by Ledger I mean we won't have a centralized decentralized consensus protocol keeping the books for us and in 2040 quantum computers will most likely be fully viable uh Quantum memory will be developed and people will nostalgically remember you know the times where they had to buy Quantum ledgers and they had to count their and Tangle cubits to to transact as a thing of the past and this will most likely change Finance forever once again so having said this what is quantum Computing is probably a question that many people are you know wondering about if you're not practical of the field let's say so the idea of Quant Computing is that these are computers that leverage some fundamental principles of quantum mechanics uh our computers today already leverage quantum mechanics like transistors work with quantum mechanics but they simulate and they operate on a classical theory of computation here we are talking about Quantum computation so these computers will be probabilistic they will average uh things like quantum entanglement and contextuality and they are considered very interesting uh by old theoreticians because they allow you to do things that is that are classically impossible so there are we have a lot of theorems that basically tell us okay there is this thing that we cannot do with a classical computer and we can only do it if we have Quantum Resources uh so a question that many people have asked uh is okay cool but do quantum computers exist like you know every year every 20 years we keep hearing that quantum computers are 20 years away and they seems like they never arrive the reality of things is that yes quantum computers do exist today uh you can actually use a quantum computer on the cloud uh IBM allows you to do it I think quanum allows you to do it the problem is that these computers are very limited at the moment you can do very little stuff uh but the progress on Quantum Computing has been exponential if not super exponential basically uh mors law holds for quantum computers at least at the moment uh so we will expect we are expecting a lot of progress from the hardware side in the next years so what I really want to talk about uh is quantum cryptography um this is a very very interesting topic for everyone working in blockchain because at the end of the day everything we do today it is possible thanks to cryptography the biggest advancement that blockchain has brought to the world so far is cryptography cryptographic Primitives that were considered Unthinkable before like zero knowledge proofs are now used they are viable and I remember you know being in a space five years ago people will say yeah zero knowledge proofs like Nars those are 50 years away there's no way this can be built faster and today we see them used pretty much everywhere so what does Quantum Computing bring to cryptography U I'm show you I'm showing you some examples of cryptographic Primitives that are impossible to achieve classically one of them uh is uh sorry I forgot this slide um that when people talk about Quantum Computing the the thing that you know many people talk about are things like shes algorithm shes algorithm is basically this thing that allows you to crack classical cryptography and it's a kind of thing that basically says you can do something that we can already do today but exponentially faster so that's the problem you cannot break a cryptographic key today uh like scdsa without you know wasting the time of the universe to get the key out but with shows algorithm you can Factor these things very quickly so this is what people think about when they think about applications of quantum to cryptography but there is much more so one thing that we can do for instance is quantum W signature uh we have been working on this with Justin Drake from theum Foundation uh me and Stephan are there have a project open with them and the idea is that these things are basically Quantum Primitives that allow you to delegate someone to sign a message on your behalf only one only one time it's like you know you can just sign one document and then your pen disappears uh this thing seems trivial it is provably not doable with a classical computer and it allows you to achieve things like um up uh instant finality for instance so you can have blockchains that finalize instantly without recurring to tendermint and a lot of other things um another thing that we can do this is one of the few examples of quantum Tech that is already being used today between Banks and financial institutions is quantum key distribution so the idea of quantum key distributions is basically this if I give you some data classical data you can copy it you know you can basically put like a a device on my fiber optic networks or on my copper wires and you can see the data that passes through you can copy it then if it's encrypted you can decrypt it but the point is you can copy that data without the part is communicating noticing this is impossible in Quantum Computing we have a theorem that is called No cloning theorem that basically says you cannot copy Quantum information if you want to observe quantum information you change it forever and we can leverage this principle to basically build cryptographic channels where if I send you something and someone is EES dropping on a channel we can detect it so we can basically have secure keys that are unforgeable in a way because you know we literally will know if someone is trying to fiddle with our keys it's like we have police on The Wire that you know connects us in a way which by the way is not even a wire because you can share and Tangle States over satellites and do sci-fi Unthinkable [ __ ] but that's a thing for another day another thing that people are excited about is quantum money and again these basically leverages on the same principle what is money money is something that you cannot easily copy that is like the most basic property that money needs to have we use gold as a reserve because gold is rare you know we we cannot produce gold out of thin air before you know historically people have used like um shells sea shells to transact for the same reason we are not using for instance hair as currency because you can literally grow hair on top of your head so it's like you know everyone is a central bank producing currency uh nonstop so the point is okay if I cannot copy Quantum States but I can transfer them that is [ __ ] money I I can literally say okay this Quantum State uh represents a fixed amount of currency I give it to you I don't have it anymore and basically the laws of physics guarantee that I cannot [ __ ] with that you know it's like it's a transaction and again you cannot counterfeit money uh so it will literally work like cash but it will be able we will be able to exch change it remotely like digital money instantaneously without using a ledger that's the thing you you don't need a network of validators to check that everything was respected I have a Quantum Channel with someone I give them my Quantum State I don't have it anymore physics says yeah go ahead perfect and that's it uh so yeah this is this is basically the end game uh Stephano here will have a talk about this later on the idea of device and dependent Quantum cryptography is that you can build cryptographic Primitives with absolutely insane security guarantees so at the moment you know if you use any classical um cryptography primitive there is still the problem that maybe NSA is tampering with your device we know that happened in the past right and they can basically copy the information out of your device before you encrypt it like you know if I have my phone and my phone is act yeah okay I can use pointto Point cryptography uh on signal but who gives a [ __ ] like the information gets fetched and copied without you knowing before it is encrypted and sent the problem is not the channel the problem is the Trojan or on your devices and this is a real threat at the moment the viice independent Quantum cryptography is some sci-fi Delirious thing that when you hear it for the first time you're like what the actual [ __ ] basically what that means is that you can assume that your device is compromised you can assume that the NSA went to the factory that builds your chips and put a back door on your chips and still they cannot get your information out that is the end game of security that that there is nothing more than that that is basically a cryptographers dream in a way and again this is guaranteed by the quantum no cloning theorem is someone tries to tamper with your device and use a back door you will know you will have a notification popping up on your Quantum PC saying hey someone is [ __ ] with you you know be careful so what is the conclusion of this talk the conclusion is that at the moment when we talk about Quantum Computing in crypto we are still do it doing it from a defensive posture it's like Quantum is a threat we have to you know prepare and to reinforce our cryptography and and stuff like that and that is something that we have to do absolutely that's absolutely something that I respect but Quantum Computing will also enable things that are Unthinkable today and I think you know in the long run this is not the right posture the right posture is understanding that we have an incredibly valuable technology that will change the world forever and if we embrace it in full and we really push hard on Quantum web tree and Quantum cryptocurrencies we will have something that today we can only dream about so if there is one take-home message from this talk that I really want you to to understand is this reject Quantum dorismar Quantum hopefulness that's it and by the way if you're interested in this stuff go on that website uh where you know we are putting up some resources with people that want to understand more of this world that is just blooming right now thank you very much thank you fabrio this was amazing very comprehensive very inspiring do you have any questions for our amazing fabrio go ahead please thank you so thank you thank you very much for your presentation first of all um about the timeline you showed at the beginning of of your speech um like I I understand that it's like a very nice story to make us understand the the thing but I was wondering if there are any uh like uh signals or hypothesis to let us understand like in realistic terms what is the timeline of the implementation of quantum Computing from a mass scale point of view thank you you know I think that a very good skill to off is to recognize when you are not like fully aware of something I'm not a Quantum Hardware expert luckily that guy is so I'll let Ian answer this question for you hi so this is kind of um the subject of my talk later on I'll go into sure yeah yeah yeah you will join the stage soon so if you want yeah yeah yeah you can move yeah yeah so the the main thing that we're dealing with here is uncertainty and a lack of information there is information we have from the companies and it's vague there's nothing complete about anything that anybody says about the timelines the hardware the performance the gates the components it's just it's very very fuzzy and we don't have um a lot of information from any company we have a little bit of information from a lot of companies and they're all kind of targeting 2027 but that may or may not actually come to I it's just so the risk becomes real from over 10 companies in 2027 so I think that's kind of a good napkin calculation we know it's a real problem soon but it may not happen until 2028 it might I'll cover this more in my talk the algorithms but thank you for youen thank you thank you guys because this would be the introduction for our NE next SP