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Google is developing a digital currency concept that could eliminate the need for blockchain technology entirely by harnessing the fundamental laws of physics instead of complex computer code, according to company researchers.
A new study titled “Anonymous Quantum Tokens with Classical Verification” presents a new protocol where a bank can distribute quantum tokens that are indistinguishable before measurement. It enables users to validate their tokens using only classical operations. The research was conducted by scientists from Google Quantum AI, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Czech Academy of Sciences. The paper advances a decades-old theoretical concept for currency that would be protected by the unchangeable laws of quantum physics.
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The groundbreaking research into “quantum money” directly challenges the technological foundation that has supported cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin for over a decade, the study’s authors argue. Rather than relying on distributed ledgers and computational power, this new approach would secure digital currency through quantum mechanics itself.
“It’s this crazy tool,” Dar Gilboa, a Google Quantum AI researcher and co-author of the study, told Decrypt. “You can do all these wild things. It’s high risk, high reward—but that’s what makes it exciting.”
The quantum money system makes counterfeiting not merely difficult from a computational standpoint, as Bitcoin does, but physically impossible. “If you had a $1 bill that was actually a quantum state, you could prove, based on the properties of quantum mechanics, that copying such a state is impossible,” Gilboa told Decrypt. “You could only succeed with very small probability.”
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Blockchain technology’s main purpose is preventing “double-spend” without requiring a central authority, Decrypt reported. It accomplishes this by maintaining a massive, public, and permanent accounting system that everyone can monitor and verify. Quantum money addresses the same problem through a more direct method. If the token itself is physically impossible to copy and can only be spent once, there is no need for a global ledger to track who owns what throughout history.
