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Cryptographers place $5,000 bet whether quantum will matterwww.theregister.com/2026/04/09/cryptograhpers_quantum_bet/
84 sats \ 1 comment \ @0xbitcoiner 9 Apr science
The time is maybe

Quantum computing exists in a sort of superposition with regard to cryptography – it's both a pending threat and a technology of no immediate consequence for decryption.

Now, two well-known cryptographers are preparing to wager on how this state of uncertainty will collapse into a measurable outcome.

For the past ten years, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been pushing for the development of Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC), based on the belief that some day, quantum computers will be capable of decrypting data encrypted with legacy algorithms.

There's some skepticism about that. Last year, Peter Gutmann, a professor of computer science at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, dismissed PQC in an interview with The Register. He noted that quantum computers have yet to factor the number 35 (6 bits) due to their inability to correct errors. Elliptic Curve Cryptography private keys have a default key length of 256 bits, so quantum computers still have a long way to go.

...read more at theregister.com
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43 sats \ 0 replies \ @south_korea_ln 9 Apr
The bet is for $5,000. Valsorda will pay if a shared secret from ML-KEM-768 – a recently approved quantum-resistant algorithm – is recovered from a public key and ciphertext, either from a classical or quantum attack. And Green is on the hook to pay if a shared secret from X25519 – a widely used elliptic curve algorithm – is recovered from a pair of public points on the curve, whether through classical or quantum means.
In theory, X25519 should be easier for a CRQC to defeat than ML-KEM-768, which is designed to offer a more robust defense against quantum cryptanalysis. So Green is essentially betting that advances in cryptanalysis will reveal weaknesses in Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation (ML-KEM) before quantum systems come into play

Much sexier mechanism than using a prediction market.

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