“Once thought to be in the realm of science fiction, IBM, Google and a handful of smaller upstarts are making significant leaps in the realm of quantum computing, refining their hardware and increasing throughput and speed.”

The great thing about living in the neighborhood adjoining The California Institute of Technology is having friends and neighbors who teach and do research at this august institution.

I have been following quantum computing for 8 years after having attended a presentation by DWave, the company that caused (no pun intended) the first wave of interest in the application of the subject. When I arrived here in beautiful Pasadena, CA and befriended neighbors in the applied

and theoretical physics departments I would gingerly inquire about their views on quantum computing. Let’s just say, the short of it is, not likely in the next 20+ years will there be a use case beyond the “gimmicks” of “quantum supremacy” one-offs.

In other words, forget about using it for something like algo trading strategy. In fact, paradoxically, forget about crypto altogether if significant progress is made.

The reason is the one thing about quantum computing that is scarily and hilariously omitted by Mr. Tan. The types of problems that are the proximate interesting uses cases being pursued are breaking the elliptic curve cryptography algorithms (mostly to do with factoring large prime numbers) that are the foundation of (yes…) CRYPTO currencies. In fact, there’s a giant bogus industry of largely implausible blockchain projects that say they have defenses against this. “Bogus” in this case means “bullshit”.

But it is just like the crypto-cult to hail a technology advance for speculating in crypto that will doom the very thing they are promoting and making their money from. You just can’t make this stuff up.