Introducing Quantum Punks
September 4, 2024
Over the years, I met quantum people that had no idea about crypto and viceversa.
However, I also met people that are in the perfect intersection.
Finally, Alex Obadia and I decided to call them Quantum Punks and wrote a short manifesto: Quantum Punks Manifesto.
Thesis
Our main thesis is that a small yet growing field called Quantum Cryptography can:
- Lead to new cryptographic protocols that we could not build with classical cryptography
- Be accelerationist for the broader quantum industry
Even more so, a small movement of people beyond us, believes that there could be more cypherpunk applications of quantum technology that we have yet to discover.
We wrote this short doc to create awareness of what is possible and to gather like-minded people to build this future.
Example of Quantum Crypto
About 25 years before Nakamoto published the Bitcoin paper, quantum researcher Wiesner published the notion of Quantum Money.
Quantum Money is digital currency without consensus, ledgers or blockchains. It’s digital cash with physical properties. Tokens are encoded in quantum states which can be transferred over the internet (e.g. via fiber optics). Due to the no-cloning theorem, quantum money can’t be cloned and they can only be sent once.
Double spending solved.
Yet, we don’t have hardware to make this practical.
However, we do have hardware for making other cryptography practical (e.g. Quantum Key Distribution) - our bet is that we have hardware for even more than QKD.
- Nicola Greco,
Keep on rocking the decentralized web