meh my bad, I made an error in my post ... 5am here and been a 20 hour day so far.
I meant to point out that as all the particles in the universe are agreed to come to 10^80, even if a very large portion of those particles were photons (more than normal), its still a long way off.
Topic: Quantum computing storing every private key (Read 877 times)
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there are not enough photons, let alone particles of any kind, in the ENTIRE universe to encode all of the private key combinations onto. It is generally agreed that there are 10^80 particles in the known universe, and that is a long, long way off from 2^256.
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there are not enough photons, let alone particles of any kind, in the ENTIRE universe to encode all of the private key combinations onto. It is generally agreed that there are 10^80 particles in the known universe, and that is a long, long way off from 2^256.
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While the basic points of the rest of your post are mostly correct, you seem to have made a slight error here.
You seem to be implying that 2256 is larger than 1080. It is true that 1080 is a long way off from 2256, but not in the direction that you think. 1080 is much larger than 2256
2256 = 1.158 X 1077
1077 is much less than 1080
Ok I'll bite. But, I'm not even going to get into all the absurdities of observing particles and the resulting consequences....I'm going to just talk straight numbers.
First task is to discover some method where we can encode any photon to reliably represent 1 value from a set of 2^256. It would be required to hold this state indefinitely , and recovery of the encoding would require an error rate much less than 1:2^256...otherwise you start to lose keys. I'm no quantum physicist, but I follow the field as much as I am able, and as far as I'm aware, there are no properties, super states, spin configuration, or anything else at present that would allow anywhere NEAR that number of identifiable encoded states to be represented by a photon or any particle.
Secondly, even if we DID manage to find some property, state, *add sci-fi here*....the simple fact is, there are not enough photons, let alone particles of any kind, in the ENTIRE universe to encode all of the private key combinations onto. It is generally agreed that there are 10^80 particles in the known universe, and somewhere in the region of 10^65 photons. Even if a considerably larger portion of photons were available say 10^66 (which is 10 times more), the number available is still a long way off from 2^256 (or 10^77 as rightly pointed out below by another member).
Such a long way in fact, that you could take all of the photons and other particles in our solar system (that's the Sun, planets, rocks, comets, dust) millions of times over, and that wouldn't even come close to covering the numbers gap between available photons and 2^256.
Thirdly...storage of all these particles......if you packed them all as tight as you could together, you'd still need a "hard drive" about the size of a galaxy. But don't get too happy about your new Unibyte drive, because good old gravity is still around and you'd end up with a mega-blackhole, which would collapse so violently you'd probably end up with a rip in space time, followed by a "Big Bang"
Finally, food for thought......a modern, top of the range Xeon powered server, just counting from 0 all the way to 2^256, would consume ALL the energy within the Sun before it completed its task.
EDITED: as I made an error in my post as pointed out
First task is to discover some method where we can encode any photon to reliably represent 1 value from a set of 2^256. It would be required to hold this state indefinitely , and recovery of the encoding would require an error rate much less than 1:2^256...otherwise you start to lose keys. I'm no quantum physicist, but I follow the field as much as I am able, and as far as I'm aware, there are no properties, super states, spin configuration, or anything else at present that would allow anywhere NEAR that number of identifiable encoded states to be represented by a photon or any particle.
Secondly, even if we DID manage to find some property, state, *add sci-fi here*....the simple fact is, there are not enough photons, let alone particles of any kind, in the ENTIRE universe to encode all of the private key combinations onto. It is generally agreed that there are 10^80 particles in the known universe, and somewhere in the region of 10^65 photons. Even if a considerably larger portion of photons were available say 10^66 (which is 10 times more), the number available is still a long way off from 2^256 (or 10^77 as rightly pointed out below by another member).
Such a long way in fact, that you could take all of the photons and other particles in our solar system (that's the Sun, planets, rocks, comets, dust) millions of times over, and that wouldn't even come close to covering the numbers gap between available photons and 2^256.
Thirdly...storage of all these particles......if you packed them all as tight as you could together, you'd still need a "hard drive" about the size of a galaxy. But don't get too happy about your new Unibyte drive, because good old gravity is still around and you'd end up with a mega-blackhole, which would collapse so violently you'd probably end up with a rip in space time, followed by a "Big Bang"
Finally, food for thought......a modern, top of the range Xeon powered server, just counting from 0 all the way to 2^256, would consume ALL the energy within the Sun before it completed its task.
EDITED: as I made an error in my post as pointed out
There's a picture of the Sun that explains the magnitude of all this, but I don't have it with me right now.
Well you never know how many photons you could fit inside a crystal!
http://www.dailytech.com/Storing+Data+in+a+Photon/article5792.htm
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/162289-light-stopped-completely-for-a-minute-inside-a-crystal-the-basis-of-quantum-memory
There's a picture of the Sun that explains the magnitude of all this, but I don't have it with me right now.
In the near future, could bitcoin be doomed if we found a way to store a private key on a photon and could index and search every single private key at the speed of light?
Does that even make sense? is it even possible? what is your take on this theory?
Does that even make sense? is it even possible? what is your take on this theory?
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