Hi everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of Web 3 with A6 and Z, our show about building the next generation of the internet. I'm Sonal, and today's episode is all about quantum computing, the what, where, when, why, and also how it applies to blockchains. As always, we tease apart the signal versus the noise in science by press release,

especially given ongoing quantum computing milestone announcements.

We also discuss timelines for quantum computing becoming a reality,

in particular when it comes to breaking classic computing-based cryptography systems.

And so we also help answer questions on when do builders need to plan

their switch to a post-quantum crypto world, what pitfalls to avoid there, and what the community

needs to do to upgrade blockchains to be quantum resistant, which are unique from encryption-based

systems. We briefly cover different approaches to post-quantum crypto and also dig deeper towards the

end on zero knowledge or succinct-proof systems and post-quantum crypto and also dig deeper towards the end on zero

knowledge or succinct proof systems and post-quantum crypto. Our expert guests are Stanford University

professor and applied cryptography expert and pioneer Dan B'nai, also senior research advisor to A6 and Z

crypto, and Justin Thaler, research partner at A6 and Z, professor at Georgetown, and longtime expert

and pioneer in interactive MCK proof systems. As a reminder, none of the following is investment,

business, legal, or tax advice. Please see A6NC.com slash disclosures for more important information,

including a link to our investments. Dan, I'll have you kick off with explaining quickly

what is quantum computing at as much of a high level as you can and why cryptographers worry about it. And Justin, I'll have you kick off with explaining quickly what is quantum computing at as much of a high level as you can and why cryptographers worry about it.

And Justin, I'll have you jump in after to share what quantum computers are good for.

You know, it gets kind of technical pretty quickly, but at a high level, we can say that the idea actually dates back to Richard Feynman.

He realized that there are some quantum experiments that are very difficult to simulate on a classical computer.

You'd like to do the computations to figure out what the quantum system does, but it just turned out to be very, very difficult to do.

So he had this brilliant insight that said,

ah, you know, maybe the reason is difficult to simulate quantum experiments

...