Breakthrough quantum computing research out of Germany could lead to a revolution in particle physics with implications for finance, economics, and cryptocurrency. It might be time for firms in the crypto industry to add chief science officers and particle physicists to their portfolios.
Much like the tech industry before it, crypto has bootstrapped itself on the virtue of its own feats of engineering and innovation. The engineering and innovation it took to invent blockchain and cryptocurrency are, arguably, analogous to the advent of personal computing and the internet.
Over the past 20 years, however, the tech industry has shifted towards hard science. Perhaps it’s time for crypto to follow suit.
Amazon, IBM, Google, Microsoft, and Meta all have quantum computing laboratories. Some of the most important research in the field of physics and quantum computing have come out of big tech labs.
The realization of time crystals in a quantum processor in 2021, for example, happened primarily in Google’s lab. And both Microsoft and IBM have contributed to pushing the boundaries of “quantum advantage” in their own labs.
Quantum advantage
In their Aug. 2 paper titled “Quantum advantage and stability to errors in analogue quantum simulators,” a team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics demonstrated a path to quantum advantage over what’s called the “many-body-model” problem.
Quantum advantage is a non-scientific term referring to something that a quantum computer can do that a classical, binary computer either couldn’t do or couldn’t do quickly enough to be useful.
The researchers in Germany simulated a quantum setup that, according to their peer-reviewed research, is theoretically capable of demonstrating clear quantum advantage in the area of many-body problems. Most significantly, their particular architecture would mitigate errors, one of quantum computing’s biggest outstanding problems.
Crypto physics
Quantum advantage in the area of many-body problems could potentially upend the field of particle physics. Everything from cold fusion to quantum teleportation could be on the table as humanity expands its ability to predict particle physics at expanding scales.
If you've seen the old video game “Pong,” you’ve seen a particle physics simulator. The game challenges you to track a single particle in the form of a ball. If you can imagine trying to track dozens, thousands, or trillions of particles at the same time, you’re getting close to elementary particle physics and the many-body problem.
As the number of particles — or bodies — increases, the problem of predicting particle motion becomes intractable to the point of failure.
Econophysics
We can apply particle physics to finance by imagining every historical, active, and future transaction as a particle. While this may sound unintuitive, the application of physics solutions to economics problems dates back as far as science. In modern parlance, the term “econophysics” was coined to describe the amalgam in the early 1990s as personal computers began gaining traction.
In the same vein, it’s not difficult to imagine “cryptophysics” rising to prominence as quantum computing matures.
Hypothetically speaking, a quantum computer capable of demonstrating advantage over binary computers in solving many-body problems would be orders of magnitude more capable of predicting market movements than any supercomputer.
Bitcoin (BTC) transactions, for example, should be fundamentally simpler for a sufficiently powerful quantum computer to treat as a many-body model problem than fiat currency because we know exactly how much bitcoin there will ever be.
Related: DARPA release highlights difficulty in developing quantum finance solutions