The “World’s Most Powerful Quantum Computer” Is a Hoax with Staged Photos [pdf]
scorpioncapital.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com
scorpioncapital.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com
They might not be wrong, but that would be a happy coincidence imo
This is what they produce - quantity over quality. This is what their managers think the client wants - they are paying by the hour afterall, got to give them a big pile or work.
You can only have two of; fast, accurate and magnificent prose.
as opposed to what? being a neutral observer? taking a short position after publishing the report? this is basically standard behavior from short-sellers.
Also, seems like they've had some decent wins in the past: https://scorpioncapital.com/track-record
What is dubious about this mechanism? It seems fairly straight forward and short selling doesn’t even depress the price any more than someone simply selling it to the market. In fact since they have to buy it back later they first create sell pressure down then buy pressure up later.
For sure, it's badly written, and lazily formatted. It does extrapolate quite a bit from the data it gathers, and has no undisputable evidence. But then, it's way too much to expect some small private group to do elaborate reports and gather evidence suitable for a criminal court.
If you catch them being wrong, that would be enough of an issue to discredit them. But none of the above is.
It's a lot more due diligence than most investors. (e.g. consider r/wallstreetbets)
Yes, the IonQ prospectus does have a lot of hockey-stick graphs and lots of roadmaps that look ambitions. And yes, they do distance themselves from all of those graphs in the footnotes. I do find that suspicious and somewhat misleading, too.
And an employee saying "I guess [the old fired CEO] wasn’t hype enough. And then this [new CEO] came in and just set up a SPAC, just to go public." seems pretty damning, too.
I see comments like this in any discussion involving short sellers, and I've not been given any reason to believe it is more than sour grapes. But my mind is open to it.
Yes this is theoretically possible but no it is not likely someone can make a career out of it. Short research isn't a magic wand that makes the price go down. Good faith short sellers have their positions blow up in their face all the time, sometimes just because people don't like them and wouldn't mind seeing them get their comeuppance. A short seller publishing in bad faith would be fighting an uphill battle while surrounded by easier grifts.
Surely there must be some frauds among the short sellers some of them time, but there's a common view that it's all of them all of the time. From my perspective this appears to be a conspiracy theory among bulls who think that publishing negative information about any company is a threat to their portfolio, and reason backwards from there.
The question is: how much money you're willing to bet that they're wrong?
Sales and profit are real and 100% liquid unlike the marketcap which is essentially a perpetual voting machine.
If the product is legit and starts selling , then it's gonna be shortsellers to lose out and and people betting on the company would win as long as they don't screw themselves using leverage.
Marketcap can be deflated instantly just if enough people click the sell button.
If you want to compare them you have to discount the marketcap adjusting it for the instability and undecisiveness of the human brain and also the instability of the marketplace of ideas and political currents, the instability of hero worship around the CEO and millions of other things. Once it's said and done it's a pretty big discount you have to apply.
Not only that, but if this is false it seems extremely actionable. Couldn't the characters here sue the pants off the authors if these claims are false? Not to mention the exposure to SEC action for taking a short position and then slandering the company. I know this does happen and is rarely prosecuted but combined with the civil liability that seems like a lot of exposure for Scorpion Capital.
They compare the public messaging from executives and the company website with what is publicly disclosed in the company perspective.
The report could have been 4 pages long.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_factorization_records#...
Machines that can would quickly become important to national security though.
The cryptographic implications of QC are absurdly exaggerated.
QC has no practical impact on symmetric (AES, ChaCha) or hash (SHA2, SHA3, Blake) algorithms. Impact is isolated to number-theoretic asymmetric ciphers of certain types (DH, ECDH, ECDSA, EDDSA, etc.) and even there practical attacks would require very large, fast, low-noise quantum computers. The link I posted above is to a project to create the first NIST-certified asymmetric algorithms believed to not be vulnerable to quantum attack, rendering the whole thing pretty much moot.
Every(?) current TLS session is vulnerable. _Many many_ auth sessions of other types are vulnerable. At least petabytes of stored sessions can be decoded (though not all).
It's hard to say how it's exaggerated at all. It's pretty much the device from Sneakers, but real.
That it won't break every possible thing for all time is true, but it's still about as huge as any practical thing can be.
It would require a doubling of key lengths to maintain security against quantum Grover search attacks.
> to create the first NIST-certified asymmetric algorithms believed to not be vulnerable to quantum attack
That will likely lead to much more than a doubling of key sizes; perhaps two orders of magnitude bigger. It will severely impact resource constrained cryptographic devices such as credit card chips.
Grover could in theory reduce a 256-bit cipher like AES-256 or ChaCha to a 128-bit cipher. 128 bits is still far beyond what can be brute forced with any sane or practical amount of resources or time.
It would mean 128-bit keys would be unsafe, but 256-bit or higher has been recommended for years anyway for reasons beyond QC like birthday attacks.
Also keep in mind that this is a theoretical (as in big-O notation) speedup. Real world performance would depend a ton on the speed of the quantum computer. If a QC running Grover's algorithm isn't at least as fast as e.g. a conventional CPU then it might not be much faster in practice than a custom ASIC brute forcing a full strength key. That would make it pretty much an academic demo, not even useful in practice against 128-bit keys.
It's sad that no-one has demonstrated a factorization of 4+4 bits (which should include factorizing 55,65,77,91, and 143). That would be an important milestone I think.
1/ Definition of "real", "quantum" and "computer" may vary.
More seriously I don't think there's a real bar to what constitutes a "real" quantum computer, so it's in the eye of the beholder at this point I think.
As far as I know from publicly available info, there's nothing resembling a practically usable quantum computer yet (as in, a computer that would outperform a conventional one at some practical task).
Gate model computers interest everyone because of the potential to factor large numbers; this could potentially render a lot of existing and past cryptography open to decryption that otherwise will be locked up for aeons, especially considering the apparently decaying effect of Moore's Law of late. However, it probably takes millions or billions of gate qubits to do that, whereas thousands of annealing qubits are enough to solve some interesting problems, and to contribute to finding better solutions when combined with classical compute in a hybrid setup.
The cynic in me thinks that this was intentional to provide an additional air of credibility (subconscious or otherwise) to the presentation, which is otherwise extremely unprofessional in structure, framing, font selection, emphasis, tone, etc. It reminds me more of TimeCube [0] then professional investigative research/analysis.
Isn’t there a spareness limit to the qubit arrays to maintain entanglement? How are the read and write electronics going to be reasonably sized, or ever going to achieve the density needed for a million physical qubits?
- https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IONQ?p=IONQ&.tsrc=fin-srch