this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2024
69 points (96.0% liked)

Technology

1261 readers
297 users here now

Which posts fit here?

Anything that is at least tangentially connected to the technology, social media platforms, informational technologies and tech policy.


Rules

1. English onlyTitle and associated content has to be in English.
2. Use original linkPost URL should be the original link to the article (even if paywalled) and archived copies left in the body. It allows avoiding duplicate posts when cross-posting.
3. Respectful communicationAll communication has to be respectful of differing opinions, viewpoints, and experiences.
4. InclusivityEveryone is welcome here regardless of age, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, caste, color, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.
5. Ad hominem attacksAny kind of personal attacks are expressly forbidden. If you can't argue your position without attacking a person's character, you already lost the argument.
6. Off-topic tangentsStay on topic. Keep it relevant.
7. Instance rules may applyIf something is not covered by community rules, but are against lemmy.zip instance rules, they will be enforced.


Companion communities

!globalnews@lemmy.zip
!interestingshare@lemmy.zip


Icon attribution | Banner attribution

founded 11 months ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] bunchberry@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

Personally, I think there is a much bigger issue with the quantum internet that is often not discussed and it's not just noise.

Imagine, for example, I were to offer you two algorithms. One can encrypt things so well that it would take a hundred trillion years for even a superadvanced quantum computer to break the encryption, and it almost has no overhead. The other is truly unbreakable even in an infinite amount of time, but it has a huge amount of overhead to the point that it will cut your bandwidth in half.

Which would you pick?

In practice, there is no difference between an algorithm that cannot be broken for trillions of years, and an algorithm that cannot be broken at all. But, in practice, cutting your internet bandwidth in half is a massive downside. The tradeoff just isn't worth it.

All quantum "internet" algorithms suffer from this problem. There is always some massive practical tradeoff for a purely theoretical benefit. Even if we make it perfectly noise-free and entirely solve the noise problem, there would still be no practical reason at all to adopt the quantum internet.