Anglo-Italian company says it has cracked Bitcoin. People have questions

You can't make this up.

Poking around their website makes my bullshit detector go off like crazy. The way they talk about machine learning speeding up hash search just makes no sense. And on archive.org you can see they have been talking like this for quite a while now.

"Quantum’s R&D will focus on Cryptography; bringing together the most advanced implementation techniques and functions, along with quantum computing technologies and AI deep learning, to develop a new and disruptive approach to blockchain technology."

This is very close to what I'd write as a parody. I don't think I've ever seen anyone unironically using "quantum computing", "AI deep learning", and "blockchain" all in the same sentence.

Clearly if this company had a way to generate bitcoins more cheaply than anyone else, they'd just mine the bitcoins.

Seems they're claiming they can find a predictable output from the hash function.

For those unaware, a cryptographic hash function should ideally take an input of arbitrary size and produce a fixed size output with the following characteristics:

- even distribution across key space - non-trivial predictability of input from output - completely uncorrelated output from input

It's the last feature that bitcoin relies on, which is that we need to take a given input (the block details) and come up with a random bit of information (nonce) to add to it such that the resulting hash output has certain arbitrary characteristics (i.e. begins with n number of 0s).

If they've found a way to make a hashes output more predictable such that you could determine an input that is likely to produce a given output, they could take a block, a randomly selected output with the proper characteristics, and find the appropriate nonce so as to achieve that hash output.

... no? That's the point of the hash function, that you can't compute it without computing all of it. This statement is equivalent to breaking the hash function (very severely), which lots of thought has gone into.

Granted, if you do have a break for SHA-256, arguably one of the best ways to commercialize it would be to secretly mine Bitcoin much faster than others.

Why is the FT even covering this obviously scammy company's claims?

> That policy leaves a lot of questions unanswered.

The other way to prove that is to just start mining. People will notice immediately.

Funnily enough, I know about of people that believe easily provable but unproved claims like that. They don't even have to be as gullible as Craig Wright's followers, its seemingly a generational thing for people with some unrelated clout in one domain to be therefore believed in pie in the sky things. Especially in Europe for some reason, but I've seen it amongst Baby Boomers here in the states. Don't know how the rest of the world is.