[throw149102]

Quantum computing is more worthy of funding than the Metaverse, cryptocurrency, and all of Web3 combined - yet every single thread about quantum computing has to turn into naysaying about how it might not be possible. Bitcoin alone has a market cap of over 300 billion dollars, and all of quantum computing has private + public funding of only 30 billion.

Here's the real question to those of you who don't believe in quantum computing - what do you think that money should be invested in instead? VCs are supposed to try to maximize their returns in high-risk high-reward investments using their knowledge of technology to get an advantage. It doesn't seem like to me there are that many opportunities that aren't already saturated with cash. If quantum computing has a 10% chance of paying out, that's equivalent to the success rate of startups (on average).

[randomfool]

If I invest right now, what are the chances that this round strikes it rich? The problem is that if a breakthrough is not achieved in this particular round then the company essentially goes bankrupt and my investment is worth zero.

Quantum is far enough away that unless you have deep pockets it's a donation to a charitable cause. The capital requirements are large enough that profits will be sucked up by later investors who would sooner let the company go bankrupt than let you get a decent return on your money.

[bawolff]

To be fair, i think literally anything is more worthy of funding than web3.

[edgyquant]

I’m anti-crypto as a solution to currency but I completely disagree here. Trustless databases and trustless distributed data has so many practical use cases in the corporate and political world that I think you’d have to be trying to not think of one readily.

Getting that architecture down is worth web3, even if none of the platforms and services continue on.

[tsimionescu]

There is no such thing as a trustable trustless database for anything except money. For every other piece of information that we care about, trust in the source is inevitable.

[edgyquant]

Nope not true at all. Every industry has shared information between corporations. The sciences are ripe for trustless data sets between antagonistic entities (see: nation states.)

Trustless doesn’t mean every individual human being is an equal in the chain. The more applicable situation is between organization and higher. If you think all problems are just money problems you haven’t solved many large scale real world problems.

[tsimionescu]

There are two kinds of facts: facts about the real world, and digital facts. Digital facts can be secured with fancy cryptography in various ways leading to the ability of a trustless database holding such facts - such as a (secured) git repo or the Bitcoin blockchain.

Facts about the real world are true or false about the real world, you can't cryptographically secure them. I can trustlessly store the fact "I am Donald Trump" in some DB, I can prove cryptographically that I stored that fact, but there is no way to conclude from this that I am in fact Donald Trump.

For any digital fact, the relationship between it and a physical fact can only be established by a trusted entity. A government office can digitally sign a statement that the holder of some private key is indeed Donald Trump, and you can then believe that any statement signed by that private key was signed by Donald Trump - IF you trust the government.

Similarly, whether some scientific data set is held in a Chinese RDBMS controlled by a Chinese university or whether it is stored on some public block chain, I have more or less the same amount of trust for that data set.

[bawolff]

"Trustless" and "distributed" are ambigious words that means a lot of different things. Generally there is a mismatch between the type of distributed trustlessness that web3 talks about and all those "practical use cases in the corporate and political world".

[edgyquant]

That depends on the company. Yeah Ethereum is a meme with tons of meme companies but I assure you there are web3 companies solving real problems you just haven’t heard of them because the things they’re solving aren’t sexy memes like anti-government currencies.

[bawolff]

Yeah well, people have been saying that for years, and the years go by, and yet i still haven't heard of these companies.

[quickthrower2]

Market cap is BS in crypto. Last transaction price * number of coins. Means nothing because volume/liquidity isn’t there.

[balsam]

Speaking as an quantum computing academic, I would suggest that money should be redirected from quantum computing into all kinds of biotech, except quantum computing based biotech. There’s never too little money invested in biotech research (as clinical as you can manage), only too much money off siphoned by lab reagent and equipment manufacturers. Unfortunately, non-biotech VCs have even less understanding of this tech than even quantum. That is, assuming most physicists “don’t even understand quantum” — hey, that is why I am a physicist, not a VC. But might considering becoming one after I sell my billion dollar bootstrapped QC company. Yep! The first QC giant will not take —or need—outside funding, for bloody obvious reasons. Just as the first hegemonic semitech company (Intel) birthed Venture Capital (and just like CAS hegemon Wolfram birthed a new kind of science /s) the first hegemonic qtech company will birth a new funding model (/s?)

[rowanG077]

I'm not sure where this is coming from. So you really believe the dollars that Facebook spends on the metaverse was just waiting to be pumped into quantum computing?

This comment really sounds like: "why go to Mars, we haven't even explored our own oceans". As if those are somehow mutually exclusive.

[sn41]

Right now, nuclear fusion reactors seems to be the thing that's ripe for investment. There are a lot of promising advances, maybe a Project Manhattan-style push might be worth trying.

[jl6]

What I’m not clear on is whether quantum computing can be best advanced through $billions of VC money competing for hypothetical future profit, or whether it is still a scientific research project which would benefit from a smaller, more focused and less hype-driven approach.

A lot of what we see reported as progress is academic or quasi-academic papers. Google has the cash to not care too much if its research never turns a profit. Those who are investing may see it as a long-term moonshot or hedge, without any great expectations of imminent profit. The bottleneck may be the number of scientists with good ideas, rather than the amount of cash available.

[wmf]

I predict that quantum computing is possible but you still have to take into account the addressable market which appears to be very small. Even assuming they work perfectly, quantum computers just aren't good for much.

[japanuspus]

Yes, we will never need more than 12 quantum computers or so /s

Computers today are used to solve the problems computers can solve: this is as vastly larger class of problems than envisioned by anyone 50 or 70 years ago, but there are still many computational problems that we do not solve.

These unsolved problems are often only known by domain experts with a deep understanding of why a specific domain is addressed by a given model.

[dthul]

Maybe we'll have quantum cards in the future like we have graphics cards now, making it available in many devices.

[totetsu]

If somehow they can work without being super cooled.

[WhitneyLand]

What’s the argument for it not being possible?

Superposition is real, the speed up will be real once it scales up.

I know there’s a lot of details to figure out but I’m not aware of any that seem insurmountable given all the effort going into it and incremental progress that continues to be made.

[bawolff]

I think the current argument against them is that some people think that the error rate of qubits will grow exponentially with size of machine in such a way that the error rate will outrun the ability of error correcting codes to fix errors. (Not a quantum scientist. I probably misunderstand and i have no idea how likely it is)

> Superposition is real, the speed up will be real once it scales up.

To be clear, they only speed up very select problems. It is not a general speed up.

[tromp]

I just find it hard to believe that physical reality will let us do reliable computations with superpositions of 2^1024 states. I suspect that the theory of quantum physics is some excellent approximation of physical reality that will breakdown at such absurd levels of precision.

[Ono-Sendai]

My argument would be superposition, is a kind of mathematical abstraction, that is not directly useful in the real world. Quantum computers are a kind of analog computer, and suffer from analog computer problems.

[bawolff]

??

You dont believe that the experiments observing superposition are real?

(Im only attacking the, its a mathematical abstraction, bit. Whether or not superposition can be pragmatically harnessed to make qc is a separate question)

[Ono-Sendai]

clearly some kind of superposition is real, in the same sense that classical waves can superimpose. However there is a wild gulf between that and what is commonly accepted with multi-particle quantum mechanics, which is that the universe is N-dimensional, where N is the number of particles, and that arbitrary configurations in some slice of those N dimensions can be independent of some other slice. This hasn't really been tested, and in fact quantum computing is the first real test of it. And it's not looking good for that theory.

[bawolff]

So to be clear - your view is that quantum computers can't exist because quantum mechanics is false?

[Ono-Sendai]

Well, I would say QM is an approximation of some better and more accurate theory. In my view, multi-particle quantum mechanics is pretty clearly a kind of gross hack - using a very large dimensional space so you can write down a linear theory - instead of using a smaller dimensional space with non-linear interactions. Quantum computing assumes the very large dimensional space is actually real. So we'll see if that is the case.

[rolisz]

Joscha Bach has some interesting arguments against it: http://bach.ai/quantum-computers-wont-work/

[dekken_]

> Superposition is real

Really? I wasn't aware science told us what was real.

It's called the "Copenhagen interpretation" for a reason.

[Green_man]

Do other QM interpretations predict that quantum computers wouldn't be able to benefit from superposing N qubits over 2^N (possible) output states? As far as I understand, it's not just Copenhagen that allows for this.

Would an interpretation need to reject Bell's theorem to get there? Or could it not include superposition but still keep all of Bell's theorem?

[PeterWhittaker]

Rovelli’s work on relational QM suggests to me that superposition-as-real in the Copenhagen interpretation is false, a misunderstanding of how to incorporate the observer into the equation.

Once the observer (or the affected system, same thing, in the end) is incorporated, a lot of the things about superposition that needed interpretation disappear.

Read Helgoland for more.

(My physics degree was a long time ago and my math is quite out of date. While Rovelli doesn’t discuss QC in the book, his take on what superposition is not has strong implications for QC AFAICT.)

[dekken_]

Thanks for the suggestion. I have his other book "Order of time" (beside me no less) that I have yet to finish but have liked so far.

[PeterWhittaker]

That’s a good one, next in my reread list.

[nobodyandproud]

More space travel?