(Finance) – Towards the end of 2022 there was talk of a futuristic “Quantum Highway” which should start from port of Trieste. Recently the news has made a comeback due to the recent investments that open Fibers he planned in Friuli Venezia Giulia, offering a sort of bridgehead for the start of this operation. When we talk about how many it is difficult to focus on what we are dealing with, from teleportation to parallel realities, perhaps passing through Schrodinger’s cat.
From Bits to QuBits
So what is a “Quantum Highway”? It’s actually nothing science fiction, but rather it is a concept highly topical and which, in the near future, will make all our technological apparatus extremely safer, from bank transactions to simple online communications. But what does the port of Trieste have to do with it fiber optics, the University of Bologna and former president Mario Draghi in all this? Let’s go step by step.
The computer quantum it is the next evolution of the computer. Research in this direction started in 1994, but only in 2019 did Google manage to create a first prototype, capable of solving a calculation, which in traditional computation would take 10,000 years, in just 200 seconds (in the same year also IBM proposes a first commercial model, but the news has had much less resonance). In the last 4 years the evolutions of the quantum computer have been very numerous, and although a “quantum personal computer” is still a rather remote idea, there are already commercial realities that offer their customers the power of quantum computing, including IBM itself and the Dutch research center QuTech.
If it is true that the revolution of QuBit (the quantum “bit”, i.e. the minimum amount of information managed by computers) opens up great possibilities, it is true that it also opens the door to great risks, and the most immediate is linked to cryptocurrencies: if to date “break” the encryption of a bitcoins is technically impossible, in the near future using quantum technology will not only be possible, as reported by Johann Polecsak, CTO of QAN Platform, but also incredibly simple. If this is true for Bitcoin, it is also true for all other cryptographic platforms, from bank transactions to digital signatures.
We don’t have to worry about the immediate (even if the “immediate” in IT terms can correspond to decidedly reduced times), considering that the quantum computer is still object of researchbut it is certain that we will soon see the Qubit in “mass” commercial applications.
The Quantum Highway
If on the one hand then the technology quantum risks making the current ones encryptions obsolete, on the other it offers a level of protection unimaginable with the traditional bit. Therefore, it is necessary to create a “Quantum Highway” to allow the information inside the QuBits to travel in the best possible way, practically within a safe inviolable (at least for the years to come), and optical fiber is exactly the ideal means to achieve this. The idea came to a research team from the University of Chicago, apparently in semi clandestinity, and in a short time it stimulated investments all over the world, as well as having stimulated the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Physics to Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger, pioneers of quantum computing.
There safety informatics it will be crucial in the near future within the defensive policies of each country, as underlined by former president Mario Draghi in one of his last speeches to the senate, defining quantum computing as a “challenge for Europe”.