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Comment by AndrewStephens | Hacker News Reader

Aaronson know his stuff but I am not sure he hasn’t considered the fact that, in this current hype cycle, the quantum researchers breathlessly reporting to him on a breakthrough just around the corner are just lying to him and themselves.

I have been hearing about one more technical hurdle to solve before quantum algorithms become feasible since before I graduated. That was in 1996.

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This is true, practical quantum computing is always "just a couple of years away".

At the same time, moving to more secure encryption really isn't difficult. How many times have algorithms been deprecated over the past 20 or so years? It's time to do it again.

Let's just make sure that the NSA hasn't worked in any backdoors. At latest since Snowdon, anything they work on is suspect.

And in the process immediately convert huge numbers of devices into ewaste. Then check the excuse calendar again for tomorrow's reason to deprecate yet another batch of "legacy" ciphers from openSSL.

The sooner we start making devices ready for better encryption systems, the fewer devices will be wasted.

No, because there always are "better encryption systems", whether for good reasons or not that's another story.

It's not another story, the quality of the reasons for scrapping / upgrading devices is the most important thing here.

If the reasons are "the current devices are insecure or likely to become insecure" that's very different from "the new encryption system is a little bit better so there's not much point in upgrading".

If quantum computing never becomes a practical thing, the current hardware and software will stay secure. If it becomes practical, they won't. Seems simple enough.

There is no clear evidence that the risk of "a practical post quantum computer would arrive in the next 5 years" is greater than "post quantum scheme X is broken" for any scheme X. The only way to go is hybridation and it is quite hard from an engineering point apparently.

There is evidence of the opposite: graph singular isogeny mumbo jumbo algorithm was proven to be easily broken on an ordinary computer.

Hybrid encryption is as simple as running one encryption and then the other. Problem is mostly that post quantum keys are large.

Am I missing something fundamental here?

If Algo-A and Algo-B both rely on "factoring big numbers is hard!" then once the Quantumpocalypse occurs, breaking Algo-B(Algo-A(plaintext)) is no harder than asking ChatGPT 99.5 to add an extra step in your vibe coded cracking engine's frontend, such that it now does B_breaker < cyphertext | A_breaker >> plaintext.lol or whatever the equivalent is for the fashionable language of the that future day.

You have to break both algorithms. One of them is quantum-safe if it's secure, but it could also be completely insecure like supersingular isogeny was.

He was saying hybrid encryption as in use both a well established classical "factoring big numbers is hard!" algo and also a fancy new post quantum cryptography algo. That way if it turns out the fancy new algo can be broken by non-quantum computers at least you aren't in a worse position than you were in before because you are still protected by the well established classical algo.

I hard disagree with your assertion that moving to more secure encryption isn't difficult. It is insanely difficult, especially at global scale.

It'll be a 90/10 rule: 90% of the upgrades will be straightforward. It's important the 10% that'll be hard early. For many it's probably already too late.

Are you saying this because it's an evergreen joke or because you really think there hasn't been meaningful progress in the field since 1996?

Duke Nukem Forever was release fifteen years ago. Some things never happen until they suddenly do.

The wolf really does eat the boy at the end of The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

But Duke Nukem was developed with visible progress.

We are still not factoring 21, let alone 35, let alone numbers with thousands of digits.

Quantum correction algorithms (that would allow factoring of thousands of digits) begin to work when the gate fidelity and other parameters are above certain threshold.

> gate fidelity and other parameters are above certain threshold

A threshold that might be beyond what the physical properties of our universe allow. It is still unclear.

This possibility means discovery of new physics that has no indications of existence yet.

This is what bugs me about both quantum computers and commercial fusion power. There's so much talk about how it's just inevitable and will happen soonish, but a lot of the evidence suggests, in some cases strongly, that it might not ever be possible.

I find it weird how bleeding edge research, at the very edges of both physics and engineering, is treated as though it's a market development about to drop. Possibly a consequence of pure R&D having all but died? Getting funded requires pretending there's a business plan for what you're working on?

There's no strong evidence of impossibility. For quantum computers to be impossible at scale we need new unknown physics. Fusion requires lots of engineering. And before those engineering efforts would show practical impossibility or impracticality, there can't be strong evidence.

By not ever be possible, I mean in a practical sense, including e.g. the economics of it, as well as reliability, checkability, etc.

Jassby's article about fusion (https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-the...) describes several well-understood issues that could prevent commercial fusion power from ever being practically possible.

For quantum computers, the situation is quite similar. Michel Dyakonov and several others have laid out the situation well.

At least we don't have anyone claiming that interstellar travel is just 10 years away, yet. Probably because it's more difficult to make an economic case for it. But the issues are quite similar. In principle, in terms of physics, nothing prevents an interstellar journey. In practice, it just isn't going to happen.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf is a story about a boy who have seen a wolf, successfully threatened the wolf away by causing a commotion in a disbelieving village. One day the disbelieving village refused to show up, boy was eaten and thus proven correct.

But as it happens in real life politics too, people who were just proven they were wrong continued to blame the boy.

The story is told from the point of view of a villagers trying to hide their culpability by blaming the victim.

> The Boy Who Cried Wolf is a story about a boy who have seen a wolf, successfully threatened the wolf away by causing a commotion in a disbelieving village

What happened before that in the story

That's one way to completely reframe the story to fit the narrative you want to push

quantum computers will flourish the same day that fusion does.

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