Quantum miners would yield ‘massive’ energy savings for blockchain: Study

A pair of scientists from the College of Kent’s Faculty of Computing in the UK lately carried out a examine evaluating power consumption charges for present ASIC-based miners to proposed quantum-based options.

In keeping with the staff’s preprint analysis paper, the methods using quantum computing demonstrably outperformed normal mining rigs in power effectivity:

“We present that the transition to quantum-based mining might incur an power saving — by comparatively conservative estimates — of about roughly 126.7 TWH, or put in another way the overall power consumption of Sweden in 2020.”

Bitcoin mining operations alone consumed greater than 150 terawatt hours yearly (as of Could 2022), per the paper, placing into perspective the potential influence the proposed quantum-based methods might have.

The pair’s conclusions have been based mostly on experiments evaluating three totally different quantum mining methods to an Antminer S19 XP ASIC miner.

The quantum mining gadgets have been break up between a system that includes a single layer of fault tolerance, one other one with two layers of fault tolerance and one with none devoted error-correction options.

Because the researchers level out, blockchain mining is without doubt one of the few areas of quantum computing the place error correction isn’t such a giant deal. In most quantum capabilities, errors create noise that functionally restrict a computing system’s means to supply correct computations.

In blockchain mining, nonetheless, success charges with state-of-the-art classical methods are nonetheless comparatively low. Per the analysis paper, “A classical Bitcoin miner is worthwhile with solely a success-rate of about 0.000070%.”

The researchers additionally be aware that, in contrast to classical methods, quantum-based methods can really be fine-tuned over time for elevated accuracy and effectivity.

Associated: How does quantum computing influence the finance trade?

Whereas quantum computing expertise remains to be thought-about to be in its infancy, the very particular downside of blockchain mining doesn’t require a full-service quantum computing resolution. Because the researchers put it, “a quantum miner shouldn’t be, and needn’t be, a scalable, common quantum pc. A quantum miner want solely carry out a single process.”

In the end, the researchers conclude that it ought to be potential to construct miners utilizing present quantum applied sciences that exhibit quantum benefit over classical computer systems.

Regardless of the potential power financial savings, it bears point out that the researchers centered on a sort of quantum computing system referred to as a “noisy intermediate-scale quantum” (NISQ) system.

In keeping with the preprint paper, quantum miners ought to exhibit “large” power financial savings at a dimension of round 512 quantum bits, or “qubits” — a time period considerably analogous to classical computing bits.

Usually, nonetheless, NISQ methods solely function with about 50-100 qubits, although there doesn’t look like an trade normal.

Whereas the power financial savings may be possible, the prices of constructing and sustaining a quantum computing system within the 512 qubit vary have, historically, been prohibitive for many organizations.

Solely D-Wave and IBM supply client-facing methods in the identical vary (D-Wave’s D2 is a 512-qubit processor, and IBM’s Osprey weighs in at 433), however their architectures differ so enormously that comparisons between their qubit counts are ostensibly meaningless.