The success of cryptocurrency mining depends on the difficulty of generating a hash code with certain properties, e.g. beginning with a certain number of zeroes. Can quantum algorithms defeat cryptocurrency mining?
My hypothesis: with a high probability, quantum computers can defeat a randomly designed hashing problem. However, there exist hashing problems, which would be equally hard to solve by a quantum computer.
The hint: Paper by Chris Moore, Alexander Russell and L. J. Shulman "The Symmetric Group Defies Strong Fourier Sampling: Part I", arxiv: quant-ph 0501056v3 Oct 14 2005.
P.S. I already posted this question in a discussion section.
No. There are tasks that can’t be sped up by using a quantum algorithm. What’s more likely to halt cryptocurrency mining is the cost of energy required, more than anything else.
Dear Stam! I assume that, in general, there are tasks that cannot be accelerated by a quantum algorithm. But this problem is too difficult to tackle. What I want to see is some progress in specifying the conditions, in which it can/cannot be done for a concrete example, hashing, in my case.
Whether or not hashing is ``quantum ssfe" in theory isn’t as relevant as whether it is in pratice. For the moment quantum computers aren’t as widely available as it would be necessary to make a difference for cryptomining. I’d guess that the rising energy costs will affect cryptomining before quantum computers become as common as classical computers are now.
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