David Orrell, a writer and economist from Oxford who has previously supported the crypto sector, explained in a recent interview conducted for “The Quantum Insider” that the future will be quantum economy.
The scholar believes that quantum models will be used to make decisions in the financial sector, effectively predicting market trends.
The quantum realm could also be the future downfall of cryptocurrencies, with supercomputers threatening to make technologies like bitcoin obsolete.
Let’s see all the details below.
Summary
The future of quantum economy according to the crypto supporter: choices based on “qubits”
David Orrell, writer and economist from Oxford, after predicting in 2018 that cryptocurrencies would become mainstream, has now decided to make another prediction about the future of markets.
During an exclusive interview with “The Quantum Insider”, Orrell explained that in his opinion the future of the economy will be quantum and will heavily impact the way we make financial decisions.
It does not refer to the concept of subatomic particles typical of quantum mechanics, nor to quantum physics applied to black holes in quantum computing hardware, but rather to mathematical models used to measure and predict economic changes.
Starting from the definition of classical economics, which uses the unit of measurement of the bit to perform calculations as if it were an on/off switch, the economist has moved on to the theory of quantum computing, where bits are replaced by qubits, which are more malleable and flexible than the previous ones.
“A qubit can be compared to a spectrum of colors, offering different shades and complexities. It’s not just zero or one. Qubits are entangled; they interact with each other, introducing uncertainty in measurement. This fundamental difference is what sets it apart. And as I have already said, the key point is to demonstrate that models based on this principle can be profitable and effective.”
Orrell believes that quantum models, as they are able to apply to the context in which they find themselves, are able to manage uncertainty in a more adequate way, offering a more nuanced approach to understanding economic behaviors, with many advantages in terms of market analysis accuracy compared to classic forecasting models.
Continuing, he stated:
“I discovered that people were using quantum models in social sciences for things like decision-making – in other words, how to use a quantum model to account for the decision-making process. Just like in normal economics, instead of constantly making completely rational decisions, we are discovering that there are all these other things happening in the background that interfere with mental processes”
In this sense, the scholar means that a new class of tools, still little used in the economic field, can be applied to study concepts such as the flow of money and information within a financial system, discovering at the same time new approaches to investment in the crypto world and markets in general.
For Orrel, one of the most significant challenges in this field is increasing awareness and promoting a more open attitude within the research community regarding the topic.
Seeing encouraging signs for the future, just like when in the past he described the field of crypto as a rapidly growing sector, the economist predicts that the themes of quantum computing and quantum mechanics will positively influence mainstream interest in the fields of quantum economics.
To support his thesis and promote culture in these areas, Orrell founded his scientific journal called “Quantum Economics and Finance” in which he further explores scientific studies about quantum economics.
The role of quantum computers and the threat to the crypto world
Leaving now the field of quantum economics described by Ornell and moving on to quantum computing, we can affirm that several cryptography experts have often expressed their concerns about the advancement of this technology regarding the future of cryptocurrencies.
In practice, many computer scientists agree that in a few years quantum supercomputers will be able to decrypt the seed of a Bitcoin wallet (or other networks) using “brute forcing” technique, effectively making one of the most innovative cryptographic technologies of the last century obsolete.
In detail, it is believed that in the future quantum computing will help malicious individuals to decrypt the 12-word seed phrase of a wallet containing 128 bits of entropy, combining a set of 2000 words together and randomly extrapolating billions of existing options, eventually decrypting the correct one in a short amount of time.
As stated by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in the USA, in the future quantum computers could be able to break the currently used public key encryption algorithms, threatening the security of transactions and digital signatures.
It’s not all here: the speed at which the field of quantum computing is evolving leads to think that it will not only be the field of crypto that is threatened, but more generally all those who use “cryptography” within it, such as defense and private communication infrastructures managed by States.
In this sense, if quantum computing were to grow as expected, the effects of innovation could be so enormous as to push experts to create new post-quantum encryption standards capable of withstanding computing speed.
Currently, the power of quantum computers is still extremely limited: they are not able to break a country’s security systems nor to guess a private key from a crypto wallet.
For the future, however, we will have to prepare for the possibility that quantum computing will grow to the point of being able to decipher a code with high entropy.
Progress is already happening, but it is necessary for the study of new defensive software to continue until these supercomputers are rendered harmless, as they currently threaten the future of the global economy.
