Saudi Arabia enters the quantum race with Pasqal’s 200-qubit system as Bitcoin security debate flares

Aramco, a Saudi-owned integrated energy and chemicals company and Pasqal, a global provider of neutral-atom quantum computing, have announced the rollout of their most powerful quantum computer yet. While this is a great establishment for the companies, to the crypto community, this renews their anxiety.

Loïc Henriet, CEO, Pasqal, said, “This is a historic milestone with Aramco. The deployment of our most powerful quantum computer yet is a piece of history and a landmark for the Middle East’s quantum future. Pasqal continues its expansion, delivering practical quantum power to industry.”

Pasqal system renews attention on a long-term risk

According to Aramco, the 200-qubit machine has been installed at its Dhahran data centre and has been designed for industrial applications such as energy modelling and materials research.

Saudi Arabia’s move places it alongside governments in the US, China, the EU, the UK, Japan, India, and Canada that have funded national quantum programs aimed at expanding research infrastructure and training the workforce needed for future fault-tolerant systems.

However, research scientist Ian MacCormack stated that a 200-qubit system is small in practical terms. According to him, current machines are limited by noise and short coherence times, which restrict the number of operations they can perform.

“200 qubits is enough to do some interesting experiments and demonstrations, assuming the qubits are high quality, which is hard to do with even that few of them, but nowhere near enough to do error corrected computing of the sort you would need to run Shor’s Algorithm,” he said.

The Pasqal system has renewed attention on a long-term risk known as Q-Day. The moment a quantum computer becomes powerful enough to derive a private key from a public key and forge digital signatures. The concern is that such a capability would undermine the cryptography used by Bitcoin and also undermine the many security systems that underpin the global economy.

Companies set goals to build bigger quantum computers

So far, early-stage processors, including the 200-qubit Pascal machine and Google’s 105-qubit Willow chip, remain well below the threshold needed for such attacks. 

As reported by Cryptopolitan, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin told developers in Buenos Aires on Tuesday that quantum computers will have the ability to break the cryptography holding Bitcoin and others as early as 2028.

However, Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor said that quantum computers are not a threat because, by the time quantum computers become capable, the Bitcoin protocol will have implemented the quantum proof upgrade.

Meanwhile, IBM has pledged a 100,000-qubit superconducting computer by 2033, while firms like IonQ and QuEra are developing ion-trap and neutral-atom approaches. Colorado-based Quantinuum aims to deliver a fully fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029.

Bitcoin pullbacks amidst quantum fears and market downturns

Bitcoin is still below its long-held $100k threshold amid a storm of quantum security fears. The latest sell-off accelerated after billionaire Ray Dalio raised concerns about Bitcoin’s vulnerability to advances in quantum computing.

“I have a small percentage of Bitcoin I’ve had forever, like 1% of my portfolio. I think the problem with Bitcoin is that it’s not going to be a reserve currency for major countries because it can be tracked, and it could be conceivably controlled, hacked, and so on,” Ray Dalio stated.

As fears increase, investors are turning their attention to privacy crypto coins. Privacy coins use advanced cryptography, which makes their transactions anonymous.

Zcash is one of the privacy coins that investors are turning to. It has increased by over 40% in the last 30 days. This demand has increased in response to privacy regulations and surveillance. On the other hand, Bitcoin has seen a 24% decline in the last 30 days.

As reported by Cryptopolitan, Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX, recently noted that Zcash is a cryptocurrency that might be resilient. The coin is trading at $507.80, which represents an 18% decline over the last week.

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