Is there any field with as big of gap between theory and experiment than QC? You read papers like this and think they will be harvesting all Satoshi's coins in a couple years and then you remember that nobody has even factored 21 yet on a real quantum computer.

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Retr0id 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Fusion power comes to mind.

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nostrademons 6 hours ago | parent [-]

It's interesting, solar panels were in this category in the 1980s and self-driving cars were in the 2010s, and both have had the gap between theory and practice significantly narrowed since.

	▲	PowerElectronix 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		With fusion it's gonna be harder, I think. First you need to pump energy into it to get the fusion itself. This involves energising supermagnets, vacuum pumps and heating and controlling the plasma. We are not even here yet. And once you get to that point, you need to harness the output energy of a million degrees plasma through something that yields a pretty high efficiency (so that pumping energy into the plasma is not only worthwhile, but makes financial sense) and requires a reasonably low maintenance. I see fusion more practical as a rocket technology (which is just basically impossible) than as an actual energy facility asset.

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xhkkffbf 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And it's worse than that. In order to "factor" 15=3x5, they designed the circuit knowing that the factors were three and five. In other words, they just validated it. And that's something you can do with a regular CPU.

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scorpionfeet 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Y2K

Oh wait: thousands of programmers started working on this in the early 90s so that there would be so few failures people thought it was a scam.

The entire financial and government infrastructure was based on ecdsa until the shift to pqc. The consequences of not preparing are literal threats to global economy. That can’t be understated. The cost to switch to (hybrid) pqc is essentially zero when compared to the costs for not doing it.

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0xdeafbeef an hour ago | parent [-]

Cost is 100+ times bigger signature size and more cpu usage. If you process several k per second it matters

	▲	scorpionfeet 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Key is 2600 bytes for mldsa 87. Your fav icon is 10x bigger than that. Verify time and encapsulation is a few hundred microseconds for one verify and encaps. Your scary proportions are minuscule in practice. Even cortex m class can handle it. Not sure you have an argument when you put it up against a typical browser session. Plus 50% of all web traffic already uses pqc ciphersuites sooooo….