RE: News Article FT21 Mar 2024 15:22
Quantum Blockchain Technologies has a whizzy name and a complicated history.
Back in 2000, it was an internet incubator called Brainspark. About half its investments had failed within a year of its Aim float. An Italian entrepreneur, Francesco Gardin, then picked up the pieces via his listed software company. By 2010, Brainspark’s main asset was a plot of land an hour from Milan that Gardin hoped to turn into a theme park. Next came a water park an hour from Turin, some Milanese sushi restaurants and an Italian hotel chain that collapsed, by which time Brainspark was called Clear Leisure.
Luke Johnson chaired Clear Leisure for a year, resigning in October 2013 after financial irregularities at its African hotels subsidiary came to light. “Unfortunately the figures were nonsense and the business was infested with litigation and fraud,” Johnson wrote at the time.
Blockchain was added to the business plan in 2018, then in 2021 to the corporate name. Quantum Blockchain Technologies, still run by Gardin, has since wrapped its collection of distressed legacy investments and legal claims in crypto jargon.
In essence, Quantum Blockchain Technologies says it has discovered more efficient ways to mine bitcoin. The proof-of-work lottery that rewards miners for maintaining the blockchain has repeating patterns that make it possible to eliminate redundant computations, it says.
We asked leading academics in the field of crypto for their thoughts on this proposition. Many were sceptical.
A screenshot from the author’s email inbox with the author’s name redacted
Making any sense of the Quantum Blockchain’s claims requires a foundational knowledge of crypto, so what follows might be a test of patience. If you’ve done the 11 hours of study needed to become a Certified Cryptocurrency Expert™, or if are happy to suffice with the “solved Sudokus” analogy, please skip forwards until we stop talking about balloons and teacups.
Bitcoin’s blockchain updates its ledger of transactions by creating a new block about every 10 minutes. Miners compete by making candidate blocks. Blocks always contain the digital fingerprint of the previous block, lots of transaction data, and an address to deliver the reward. The prize for having your candidate added to the blockchain is some newly-minted bitcoins plus any fees attached to the transactions being verified in the block.
Mining means generating a numeric fingerprint for a candidate block, known as a hash. If the hash happens to be a number that’s the same or lower than the target number se
Sign In
Follow the stocks
