Quantum computing presents threat to all crypto currencies, digital assets and passwords: industry is scrambling

This week, OpenAI claimed its system produced a solution to a 90-year-old math problem in just 88 hours — thrilling researchers and terrifying some in the crypto world.Artificial intelligence’s incredible ability to solve complicated problems could help unravel the security underpinning much of the cryptocurrency industry by accelerating the development of super-advanced quantum computers capable of cracking its defenses.While much of Silicon Valley focuses on the advent of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and when we will reach it, crypto insiders believe that Q Day — when a quantum computer becomes powerful enough to crack the cryptography protecting Bitcoin and other digital assets — is coming even sooner.“AI is rapidly increasing the rate at which the technical barriers are being overcome for quantum computers — AI is helping do that faster and faster in a way that was unimaginable even just one year ago,” Alex Pruden, CEO and Co-founder of Project Eleven, an applied research and engineer lab, told The Post.Perhaps even more concerning is who could get there first.Earlier this year, China unveiled a new quantum processor that completed a specialized computing test in a few hundred seconds — a job they estimated would take a leading conventional supercomputer billions of years. “My bet is that quantum computers will happen sooner than people expect and will happen before AGI,” Pruden said.

“A quantum computer is actually a very specific thing.And in the last five years, people have made tremendous progress, partially assisted by AI in solving some of the technical problems.”At issue: cryptography, which encrypts and secures information by using codes to scramble the material, relies on complicated math problems to keep things airtight — or lets someone with the right code gain access.

Thus far, those math problems are so advanced that no one person or classical computer can solve them in any practical amount of time, which has ma...