Six ways the crypto world is preparing for quantum computing

Last week, Google announced it had achieved a breakthrough in quantum computing. In the leading scientific journal, Nature, Google published a claim that it had achieved “quantum supremacy”—by creating a computer that could complete calculations that even the world’s fastest supercomputer could not. 

Whereas regular computers use bits, which perform calculations in the form of 1s and 0s, quantum computers use qubits, transistors that can register 1s and 0s at the same time, exponentially increasing computer power and speed.

Blockchain’s cryptography relies on the fact that it’s very hard to calculate private keys from public ones. Private keys are encrypted, and it would take the largest supercomputer thousands of years to crack them. But with the right quantum computer, cracking this code would be trivial. 

Industry experts estimate that it’d take at least a decade for this to become a problem. To prepare, leaders in the cryptography field are hard at work on…