The new decade will unfurl a bag of seismic shifts, predicts the creator of Cardano and Ethereum, Charles Hoskinson. And these changes will propel cryptocurrency and blockchain solutions to the forefront as legacy systems buckle, transform or dissolve.

In an ask-me-anything session uploaded on January 3rd, the 11th birthday of Bitcoin, Hoskinson acknowledges how the popular cryptocurrency gave him an eye-opening introduction to the world of global finance, and he recounts how dramatically official attitudes and perceptions have changed.

Every central bank in the world is aware of cryptocurrencies and some are even taking positions in cryptocurrencies. Theres really never been a time in human history where one piece of technology has obtained such enormous global relevance without any central coordinated effort, any central coordinated marketing. No company controls it and the revolution is just getting started.

And he expects its emergence to coalesce with other epic changes. In a big picture reveal, Hoskinson plots some of the major events he believes will shape the new decade.

2020 Predictions

Hoskinson says the consequences of these technologies will reach every government service and that cryptocurrencies will gain an opening once another economic collapse similar to 2008 shakes the markets this decade.

I think that means its a great opening for cryptocurrencies to be ready to start taking over the global economy.

Hoskinson adds that hes happy to be alive to witness all of the changes he anticipates, including a reorganization of the media.

This is the last decade of traditional organized media, in my view. Were probably going to have less CNNs and Fox Newses and Bloombergs and Wall Street Journals and more Joe Rogans, especially as we enter the 2025s and beyond. And I think our space in particular is going to fundamentally change the incentives of journalism. And well actually move to a different way of paying for content, curating content.

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Charles Hoskinson Predicts Economic Collapse, Rise of Quantum Computing, Space Travel and Cryptocurrency in the 2020s - The Daily Hodl

AUSTIN (KXAN) Technology companies in Austin will continue to integrate tech into the physical world in 2020, making the city smarter and more connected, analysts say.

The Austin Forum on Technology and Society will dive into the top tech trends for the coming year at its first event of 2020 Tuesday night at the Austin Central Library downtown.

Well talk about both technologies that will really become mainstream next year, even more so than now, and others that the buzz will continue, but maybe theyre not ready to become mainstream, said Jay Boisseau, the Forums founder and executive director.

Boisseau gave KXAN a preview of some of the trends to watch, including artificial intelligence, edge computing and quantum computing.

A lot of companies are already deeply involved with AI, but Boisseau believes it will move into more real-world applications this year.

Companies like SparkCognition and and Valkyrie Intelligence are already experimenting in the AI space in Austin.

KXAN profiled Valkyrie last year. The company developed a way to identify and track cars on Austin roads and hoped the technology would have an application with Army Futures Command.

Austin is also primed to capitalize on advances in edge computing, Boisseau said.

Not all computing will be in data centers and clouds, but much of it will start to move out to the real world where the data actually occurs, where things happen, he explained.

More of the physical world will be equipped with sensors and data processors that can act on data in real time as they get it.

This is especially important for self-driving cars, he said, allowing vehicles to communicate with their environment to keep people safe inside and outside the car.

Ford announced last year Austin will serve as a test market for its self-driving vehicles. The car company plans to map out the citys roads this year.

Standard computing uses binary code 0s and 1s to process data, imposing limits on the amount of processing power traditional computers can generate.

Quantum computing exploits characteristics of atoms and other tiny particles to vastly expand the abilities of processors, allowing researchers to tackle problems in fields like medicine that computers currently cant.

Well hear a lot of buzz about that, Boisseau said, even though its probably going to be three to five years before we see a lot of business adoption of quantum computing.

The Austin Forum on Technology and Society will dig into those topics and others more deeply at Tuesdays event, Top Tech Trends for 2020 (And Beyond). It starts at 6:15 p.m. at Austins Central Library.

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AI, edge computing among Austin tech trends to watch in 2020 - KXAN.com

From the emerge of cognitive intelligence, in-memory-computing, fault-tolerant quantum computing, new materials-based semiconductor devices, to faster growth of industrial IoT, large-scale collaboration between machines, production-grade blockchain applications, modular chip design, and AI technologies to protect data privacy, more technology advancements and breakthroughs are expected to gain momentum and generate big impacts on our daily life.

We are at the era of rapid technology development. In particular, technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and data intelligence are expected to accelerate the pace of the digital economy, said Jeff Zhang, Head of Alibaba DAMO Academy and President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

The following are highlights from the Alibaba DAMO Academy predictions for the top 10 trends in the tech community for this year:

Artificial intelligence has reached or surpassed humans in the areas of perceptual intelligence such as speech to text, natural language processing, video understanding etc. but in the field of cognitive intelligence that requires external knowledge, logical reasoning, or domain migration, it is still in its infancy. Cognitive intelligence will draw inspiration from cognitive psychology, brain science, and human social history, combined with techniques such as cross domain knowledge graph, causality inference, and continuous learning to establish effective mechanisms for stable acquisition and expression of knowledge. These make machines to understand and utilize knowledge, achieving key breakthroughs from perceptual intelligence to cognitive intelligence.

In Von Neumann architecture, memory and processor are separate and the computation requires data to be moved back and forth. With the rapid development of data-driven AI algorithms in recent years, it has come to a point where the hardware becomes the bottleneck in the explorations of more advanced algorithms. In Processing-in-Memory (PIM) architecture, in contrast to the Von Neumann architecture, memory and processor are fused together and computations are performed where data is stored with minimal data movement. As such, computation parallelism and power efficiency can be significantly improved. We believe the innovations on PIM architecture are the tickets to next-generation AI.

In 2020, 5G, rapid development of IoT devices, cloud computing and edge computing will accelerate the fusion of information system, communication system, and industrial control system. Through advanced Industrial IoT, manufacturing companies can achieve automation of machines, in-factory logistics, and production scheduling, as a way to realize C2B smart manufacturing. In addition, interconnected industrial system can adjust and coordinate the production capability of both upstream and downstream vendors. Ultimately it will significantly increase the manufacturers productivity and profitability. For manufacturers with production goods that value hundreds of trillion RMB, if the productivity increases 5-10%, it means additional trillions of RMB.

Traditional single intelligence cannot meet the real-time perception and decision of large-scale intelligent devices. The development of collaborative sensing technology of Internet of things and 5G communication technology will realize the collaboration among multiple agents machines cooperate with each other and compete with each other to complete the target tasks. The group intelligence brought by the cooperation of multiple intelligent bodies will further amplify the value of the intelligent system: large-scale intelligent traffic light dispatching will realize dynamic and real-time adjustment, while warehouse robots will work together to complete cargo sorting more efficiently; Driverless cars can perceive the overall traffic conditions on the road, and group unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) collaboration will get through the last -mile delivery more efficiently.

Traditional model of chip design cannot efficiently respond to the fast evolving, fragmented and customized needs of chip production. The open source SoC chip design based on RISC-V, high-level hardware description language, and IP-based modular chip design methods have accelerated the rapid development of agile design methods and the ecosystem of open source chips. In addition, the modular design method based on chiplets uses advanced packaging methods to package the chiplets with different functions together, which can quickly customize and deliver chips that meet specific requirements of different applications.

BaaS (Blockchain-as-a-Service) will further reduce the barriers of entry for enterprise blockchain applications. A variety of hardware chips embedded with core algorithms used in edge, cloud and designed specifically for blockchain will also emerge, allowing assets in the physical world to be mapped to assets on blockchain, further expanding the boundaries of the Internet of Value and realizing multi-chain interconnection. In the future, a large number of innovative blockchain application scenarios with multi-dimensional collaboration across different industries and ecosystems will emerge, and large-scale production-grade blockchain applications with more than 10 million DAI (Daily Active Items) will gain mass adoption.

In 2019, the race in reaching Quantum Supremacy brought the focus back to quantum computing. The demonstration, using superconducting circuits, boosts the overall confidence on superconducting quantum computing for the realization of a large-scale quantum computer. In 2020, the field of quantum computing will receive increasing investment, which comes with enhanced competitions. The field is also expected to experience a speed-up in industrialization and the gradual formation of an eco-system. In the coming years, the next milestones will be the realization of fault-tolerant quantum computing and the demonstration of quantum advantages in real-world problems. Either is of a great challenge given the present knowledge. Quantum computing is entering a critical period.

Under the pressure of both Moores Law and the explosive demand of computing power and storage, it is difficult for classic Si based transistors to maintain sustainable development of the semiconductor industry. Until now, major semiconductor manufacturers still have no clear answer and option to chips beyond 3nm. New materials will make new logic, storage, and interconnection devices through new physical mechanisms, driving continuous innovation in the semiconductor industry. For example, topological insulators, two-dimensional superconducting materials, etc. that can achieve lossless transport of electron and spin can become the basis for new high-performance logic and interconnect devices; while new magnetic materials and new resistive switching materials can realize high-performance magnetics Memory such as SOT-MRAM and resistive memory.

Abstract: The compliance costs demanded by the recent data protection laws and regulations related to data transfer are getting increasingly higher than ever before. In light of this, there have been growing interests in using AI technologies to protect data privacy. The essence is to enable the data user to compute a function over input data from different data providers while keeping those data private. Such AI technologies promise to solve the problems of data silos and lack of trust in todays data sharing practices, and will truly unleash the value of data in the foreseeable future.

With the ongoing development of cloud computing technology, the cloud has grown far beyond the scope of IT infrastructure, and gradually evolved into the center of all IT technology innovations. Cloud has close relationship with almost all IT technologies, including new chips, new databases, self-driving adaptive networks, big data, AI, IoT, blockchain, quantum computing and so forth. Meanwhile, it creates new technologies, such as serverless computing, cloud-native software architecture, software-hardware integrated design, as well as intelligent automated operation. Cloud computing is redefining every aspect of IT, making new IT technologies more accessible for the public. Cloud has become the backbone of the entire digital economy.

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AI, ML and quantum computing to cement position in 2020: Alibabas Jeff Zhang - Tech Observer

Northeastern researchers have used a powerful computer model to probe a puzzling class of copper-based materials that can be turned into superconductors. Their findings offer tantalizing clues for a decades-old mystery, and a step forward for quantum computing.

The ability of a material to let electricity flow comes from the way electrons within their atoms are arranged. Depending on these arrangements, or configurations, all materials out there are either insulators or conductors of electricity.

But cuprates, a class of mysterious materials that are made from copper oxides, are famous in the scientific community for having somewhat of an identity issue that can make them both insulators and conductors.

Under normal conditions, cuprates are insulators: materials that inhibit the flow of electrons. But with tweaks to their composition, they can transform into the worlds best superconductors.

The finding of this kind of superconductivity in 1986 won its discoverers a Nobel Prize in 1987, and fascinated the scientific community with a world of possibilities for improvements to supercomputing and other crucial technologies.

But with fascination came 30 years of bewilderment: Scientists have not been able to fully decipher the arrangement of electrons that encodes for superconductivity in cuprates.

Arun Bansil, University Distinguished Professor of physics and Robert Markiewicz, professor of physics, are part of a team of researchers who are describing the mechanism by which copper-oxide materials turn from insulators to superconductors. Credit: Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University

Mapping the electronic configuration of these materials is arguably one of the toughest challenges in theoretical physics, says Arun Bansil, University Distinguished Professor of physics at Northeastern. And, he says, because superconductivity is a weird phenomenon that only happens at temperatures as low as -300 F (or about as cold as it gets on Uranus), figuring out the mechanisms that make it possible in the first place could help researchers make superconductors that work at room temperature.

Now, a team of researchers that includes Bansil and Robert Markiewicz, a professor of physics at Northeastern, is presenting a new way to model these strange mechanisms that lead to superconductivity in cuprates.

In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team accurately predicted the behavior of electrons as they move to enable superconductivity in a group of cuprates known as yttrium barium copper oxides.

In these cuprates, the study finds, superconductivity emerges from many types of electron configurations. A whopping 26 of them, to be specific.

During this transition phase, the material will, in essence, become some kind of a soup of different phases, Bansil says. The split personalities of these wonderful materials are being now revealed for the first time.

The physics within cuprate superconductors are intrinsically weird. Markiewicz thinks of that complexity as the classical Indian myth of the blind men and the elephant, which has been a joke for decades among theoretical physicists who study cuprates.

According to the myth, blind men meet an elephant for the first time, and try to understand what the animal is by touching it. But because each of them touches only one part of its bodythe trunk, tail, or legs, for examplethey all have a different (and limited) concept of what an elephant is.

In the beginning, we all looked [at cuprates] in different ways, Markiewicz says. But we knew that, sooner or later, the right way was going to show up.

The mechanisms behind cuprates could also help explain the puzzling physics behind other materials that turn into superconductors at extreme temperatures, Markiewicz says, and revolutionize the way they can be used to enable quantum computing and other technologies that process data at ultra-fast speeds.

Were trying to understand how they come together in the real cuprates that are used in experiments, Markiewicz says.

The challenge of modeling cuprate superconductors comes down to the weird field of quantum mechanics, which studies the behavior and movement of the tiniest bits of matterand the strange physical rules that govern everything at the scale of atoms.

In any given materialsay, the metal in your smartphoneelectrons contained within just the space of a fingertip could amount to the number one followed by 22 zeros, Bansil says. Modeling the physics of such a massive number of electrons has been extremely challenging ever since the field of quantum mechanics was born.

Bansil likes to think of this complexity as butterflies inside a jar flying fast and cleverly to avoid colliding with each other. In a conducting material, electrons also move around. And because of a combination of physical forces, they also avoid each other. Those characteristics are at the core of what makes it hard to model cuprate materials.

The problem with the cuprates is that they are at the border between being a metal and an insulator, and you need a calculation that is so good that it can systematically capture that crossover, Markiewicz says. Our new modeling can capture this behavior.

The team includes researchers from Tulane University, Lappeenranta University of Technology in Finland, and Temple University. The researchers are the first to model the electronic states in the cuprates without adding parameters by hand to their computations, which physicists have had to do in the past.

To do that, the researchers modeled the energy of atoms of yttrium barium copper oxides at their lowest levels. Doing that allows researchers to trace electrons as they excite and move around, which in turn helps describe the mechanisms supporting the critical transition into superconductivity.

That transition, known as the pseudogap phase in the material, could be described simply as a door, Bansil says. In an insulator, the structure of the material is like a closed door that lets no one through. If the door is wide openas it would be for a conductorelectrons pass through easily.

But in materials that experience this pseudogap phase, that door would be slightly open. The dynamics of what transforms that door into a really wide open door (or, superconductor) remains a mystery, but the new model captures 26 electron configurations that could do it.

With our ability to now do this first-principles-parameter-free-type of modeling, we are in a position to actually go further, and hopefully begin to understand this pseudogap phase a bit better, Bansil says.

Reference: Competing stripe and magnetic phases in the cuprates from first principles by Yubo Zhang, Christopher Lane, James W. Furness, Bernardo Barbiellini, John P. Perdew, Robert S. Markiewicz, Arun Bansil, and Jianwei Sun, 8 November 2019, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1910411116

Read the rest here:
Superconductor or Not? Exploring the Identity Crisis of This Weird Quantum Material - SciTechDaily

FROM cognitive intelligence, in-memory-computing, fault-tolerant quantum computing, new materials-based semiconductor devices, to faster growth of industrial IoT, large-scale collaboration between machines, production-grade blockchain applications, modular chip design, and AI technologies, we can expect technology advancements and breakthroughs to gain momentum and generate a great impact on our daily lives in the year ahead.

Here are the top 10 technology trends for 2020, as seen by the Alibaba Damo Academy, Alibaba Groups global research initiative.

Artificial intelligence evolves from perceptual intelligence to cognitive intelligence

Artificial intelligence has reached or surpassed humans in the areas of perceptual intelligence such as speech to text, natural language processing, video understanding etc; but in the field of cognitive intelligence that requires external knowledge, logical reasoning, or domain migration, it is still in its infancy.

Cognitive intelligence will draw inspiration from cognitive psychology, brain science, and human social history, combined with techniques such as cross domain knowledge graph, causality inference, and continuous learning to establish effective mechanisms for the stable acquisition and expression of knowledge. These make machines understand and utilise knowledge, achieving key breakthroughs from perceptual intelligence to cognitive intelligence.

In-Memory-Computing addresses the "memory wall" challenges in AI computing

In Von Neumann architecture, memory and processor are separate and the computation requires data to be moved back and forth. With the rapid development of data-driven AI algorithms in recent years, it has come to a point where the hardware becomes the bottleneck in the explorations of more advanced algorithms.

In Processing-in-Memory (PIM) architecture, in contrast to the Von Neumann architecture, memory and processor are fused together and computations are performed where data is stored with minimal data movement. As such, computation parallelism and power efficiency can be significantly improved. We believe the innovations on PIM architecture are the tickets to next-generation AI.

Industrial IoT powers digital transformations

In 2020, 5G, the rapid development of IoT devices, cloud computing and edge computing will accelerate the fusion of information, communications, and industrial control systems. Through advanced Industrial IoT, manufacturing companies can achieve automation of machines, in-factory logistics, and production scheduling, as a way to realise C2B smart manufacturing.

In addition, interconnected industrial systems can adjust and coordinate the production capability of both upstream and downstream vendors. Ultimately it will significantly increase the manufacturers productivity and profitability.

Large-scale collaboration between machines becomes possible

Traditional single intelligence cannot meet the real-time perception and decision needs of large-scale intelligent devices. The development of collaborative sensing technology of between the Internet of Things and 5G communication technology will realise the collaboration among multiple agents -- machines cooperate and compete with each other to complete target tasks.

The group intelligence brought by the cooperation of multiple intelligent bodies will further amplify the value of the intelligent system: large-scale intelligent traffic light dispatching will realise dynamic and real-time adjustment, while warehouse robots will work together to complete cargo sorting more efficiently; driverless cars can perceive the overall traffic conditions on the road, and group unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) collaboration will get through last -mile delivery more efficiently.

Modular design makes chips easier and faster by stacking chiplets together

Traditional chip design cannot efficiently respond to the fast evolving, fragmented and customised needs of chip production. The open source SoC chip design based on RISC-V, high-level hardware description language, and IP-based modular chip design methods have accelerated the rapid development of agile design methods and the ecosystem of open source chips.

In addition, the modular design method based on chiplets uses advanced packaging methods to package chiplets with different functions together, which can quickly customise and deliver chips that meet specific requirements of different applications.

Large-scale production-grade blockchain applications will gain mass adoption

BaaS (Blockchain-as-a-Service) will further reduce the barriers of entry for enterprise blockchain applications. A variety of hardware chips embedded with core algorithms used in edge, cloud and designed specifically for blockchain will also emerge, allowing assets in the physical world to be mapped to assets on blockchain, further expanding the boundaries of the Internet of Value and realising "multi-chain interconnection".

In the future, a large number of innovative blockchain application scenarios with multi-dimensional collaboration across different industries and ecosystems will emerge, and large-scale production-grade blockchain applications with more than 10 million DAI (Daily Active Items) will gain mass adoption.

A critical period before large-scale quantum computing

In 2019, the race to reach Quantum Supremacy brought the focus back to quantum computing. The demonstration, using superconducting circuits, boosted the overall confidence on superconducting quantum computing for the realisation of a large-scale quantum computer.

In 2020, the field of quantum computing will receive increasing investment, which comes with enhanced competition.

The field is also expected to experience a speed-up in industrialisation and the gradual formation of an ecosystem. In the coming years, the next milestones will be the realisation of fault-tolerant quantum computing and the demonstration of quantum advantages in real-world problems. Either is a great challenge given present knowledge. Quantum computing is entering a critical period.

New materials will revolutionise semiconductor devices

Under the pressure of both Moore's Law and the explosive demand of computing power and storage, it is difficult for classic Si based transistors to maintain sustainable development of the semiconductor industry.

Until now, major semiconductor manufacturers still have no clear answer and option to chips beyond 3nm. New materials will make new logic, storage, and interconnection devices through new physical mechanisms, driving continuous innovation in the semiconductor industry.

For example, topological insulators, two-dimensional superconducting materials, etc. that can achieve the lossless transport of electrons and spin can become the basis for new high-performance logic and interconnect devices; while new magnetic materials and new resistive switching materials can realise high-performance magnetics Memory such as SOT-MRAM and resistive memory.

Growing adoption of AI technologies that protect data privacy

The compliance costs demanded by recent data protection laws and regulations related to data transfer are increasing. In light of this, there has been growing interests in using AI technologies to protect data privacy.

The essence is to enable the data user to compute a function over input data from different data providers while keeping the data private. Such AI technologies promise to solve the problems of data silos and the lack of trust in today's data sharing practices, and will truly unleash the value of data in the foreseeable future.

Cloud becomes the centre of IT technology innovation

With the ongoing development of cloud computing technology, the cloud has grown far beyond the scope of IT infrastructure, and gradually evolved into the center of all IT technology innovations.

Cloud has a close relationship to almost all IT technologies, including new chips, new databases, self-driving adaptive networks, Big Data, AI, IoT, blockchain, quantum computing and so forth.

Meanwhile, it creates new technologies, such as serverless computing, cloud-native software architecture, software-hardware integrated design, as well as intelligent automated operation.

Cloud computing is redefining every aspect of IT, making new IT technologies more accessible for the public. Cloud has become the backbone of the entire digital economy.

Continued here:
Where will technology take us in 2020? - Digital News Asia

It is eagerly awaited! The "Forteza" report, named after its rapporteur, Paula Forteza, Member of Parliament for La Rpublique en Marche (political party of actual President Emmanuel Macron), should finally be officially revealed on January 9th. The three rapporteurs are Paula Forteza, Member of Parliament for French Latin America and the Caribbean, Jean-Paul Herteman, former CEO of Safran, and Iordanis Kerenidis, researcher at the CNRS. Announced last April, this report was initially due at the end of August, then in November, then... No doubt the complex agenda, between the social movements in France, and the active participation of the MP in the Parisian election campaign of Cdric Villani, mathematician and dissident of La Rpublique en Marche... had to be shaken up. In any case, it is thus finally on January 9th that this report entitled "Quantum: the technological shift that France will not miss", will be unveiled.

"Entrusted by the Prime Minister in April 2019, the mission on quantum technologies ends with the submission of the report by the three rapporteurs Paula Forteza, Jean-Paul Herteman, and Iordanis Kerenidis. Fifty proposals and recommendations are thus detailed in order to strengthen France's role and international position on these complex but highly strategic technologies. The in-depth work carried out over the last few months, fueled by numerous consultations with scientific experts in the field, has led the rapporteurs to the conclusion that France's success in this field will be achieved by making quantum technologies more accessible and more attractive. This is one of the sine qua non conditions for the success of the French strategy", explains the French National Congress in the invitation to the official presentation ceremony of the report.

The presentation, by the three rapporteurs, will be made in the presence of the ministers for the army, the economy and finance, and higher education and research. The presence of the Minister of the Armed Forces, as well as the co-signature of the report by the former president of Safran, already indicates that military applications will be one of the main areas of proposals, and possibly of funding. Just as is the case in the United States, China or Russia.

Of course, the report will go into detail about the role of research, and of the CNRS, in advances in quantum computing and communication. Of course, the excellent work of French researchers, in collaboration with their European peers, will be highlighted. And of course, France's excellence in these fields will be explained. France is a pioneer in this field, but the important questions are precisely what the next steps will be. The National Congress indicates that this report will present 50 "proposals and recommendations". Are we to conclude that it will be just a list of proposals? Or will we know how to move from advice to action?

These are our pending questions:

- The United States is announcing an investment of USD 1.2 billion, China perhaps USD 10 billion, Great Britain about 1 billion euros, while Amazon's R&D budget alone is USD 18 billion... how can a country like France position itself regarding the scale of these investments? To sum up, is the amount of funds allocated to this research and development in line with the ambitions?

- Mastering quantum technologies are becoming a geopolitical issue between the United States and China. Should Europe master its own technologies so as not to depend on these two major powers? On the other hand, is this not the return of a quantum "Plan calcul from the 60s? How can we avoid repeating the same mistakes?

- Cecilia Bonefeld-Dahl, Managing Director of DigitalEurope recently wrote that Europe risks being deprived of the use of quantum technologies if it does not develop them itself. Christophe Jurzcak, the head of Quantonation, stated that it is not certain that France will have access to quantum technologies if it does not develop them itself. Is this realistic? Do we have the ressources?

- French companies currently invest very little in research in the field of quantum computing. With the exception of Airbus, the main feedback that we know of is in Canada, Australia, Spain, Germany, etc. Should we also help companies to embrace these technologies, or should we only finance research and development on the part of universities and business creators? Is there a support component for companies? So that technologies are not simply developed in France and sold elsewhere, but that France is the leading market for local developments.

See you on January 9th on Decideo for more details and our objective analysis of the content of this document.

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January 9th: France will unveil its quantum strategy. What can we expect from this report? - Quantaneo, the Quantum Computing Source

"During the past year, researchers at QC Ware and Goldman Sachs have worked on analyzing the effect of noise on the accuracy of quantum algorithms for approximate counting," said Paul Burchard, lead researcher for R&D at Goldman Sachs. "The research confirmed that the current state-of-the-art quantum algorithms for Monte Carlo sampling and approximate counting will eventually lead to more efficient simulation, but that these algorithms are sensitive to noise in current quantum hardware. As a result, implementing these algorithms on near term quantum hardware will depend on techniques analogous to importance sampling that reduce the circuit depth of these algorithms."

"QC Ware's work with Goldman Sachs is essential to gaining a better understanding of how quantum computing algorithms can eventually be used in finance and how to make the practical use of quantum computing a reality faster," said Matt Johnson, CEO, QC Ware.

"QC Ware believes that quantum computing will significantly impact the future of finance," said Wim van Dam, Head of Quantum Algorithms, QC Ware. "Current quantum computers are limited in the number of qubits and the circuit depth that they support. We are focused on applying QC Ware's expertise in meeting this challenge by delivering access to QC Ware's Forge cloud service to test near-term quantum applications and help build in-house quantum computing skills."

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Goldman Sachs and QC Ware Join Forces to Develop Quantum Algorithms in Finance - Quantaneo, the Quantum Computing Source

In the prominent headlines, we keep reading about the attempts to keep the world fragmented by imposing tariffs and constraining the exchange of ideas in many ways, but information keeps spreading, and with the continued spread of information, the world progresses. John Thornhill writes in the Financial Times about how China is completely redesigning finance...

Yes, the United States is working through the FinTech era, where efforts are being made to use evolving finance and technology to deliver familiar services more efficiently, but the Chinese effort, writes Mr. Thornhill, is trying to do something entirely different.

China wants to change the platform.

In the past, I have written about how the United States banking industry has lagged behind the rest of the world is moving toward a more electronic and integrated finance platform. Even in some less-developed countries, payment systems have been evolving at a faster pace than in the United States because of the need to reduce the impact of geographical distances.

Only in the past year or two have some of the larger US banks moved forward, trying to develop a more advanced system.

Commercial banks in the United States have been the biggest and most important banks in the world and have concentrated upon the more sophisticated areas of finance, rather than the basic payments systems that are the foundation of the whole financial system. And, although there have been efforts to advance the financial platforms of the American banks, it is somewhat ironic that several of the largest banks have moved toward quantum computers to revolutionize activities like risk management and trading.

Richard Waters writes about how JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs and Citigroup have entered this space in the last couple of years.

For example, Mr. Waters quotes Paul Burchard, a senior researcher at Goldman Sachs: We think theres a possibility this becomes a critical technology.

And Despite the challenges, advances in quantum hardware have persuaded the banks the time has come to leap.

One can smile at this leap, but what about the basics of banking?

Here Mr. Thornhill writes that, The speed at which China has moved from a cash to a digital-payments economy is staggering: some $17 trillion of transactions were conducted online in 2017. Chinas mobile payment volumes are more than 50 times those in the US.

The growth has come from two corporate sources, Alibaba (BABA) and Tencent (OTCPK:TCEHY). The number of users is staggering.

However, the biggest potential lies ahead. As Mr. Thornhill states, the most enticing opportunities lie abroad. About 1.7 billion people in the world remain unbanked. When they come online they will be looking for cheap, convenient, integrated digital financial services, such as China has pioneered.

China has the chance to rewire 21st-century finance.

The implication here is that United States banks will have to adjust to this payment system that China is spreading to the rest of the world.

In other words, information spreads, and even though the spread of information may be constrained in certain parts of the world, it will expand in the areas where there are fewer constraints. This is the way it has always worked throughout history. Quantum computing is currently not the answer for the US banking system.

Oh, yes, it will be fun to design new types of algorithms for quantum computers, as Mr. Waters writes, and the first of these involves a class of optimization problems that take advantage of the probabilistic nature of quantum computing to analyze a large number of possible outcomes and pick the most desirable...

But who is going to own the payments platform?

Mr. Thornhill believes that the trend in finance over the next decade will be led by the Chinese and the payments system that is being developed within China.

This has all sorts of implications for the US banking system, the US economy and the US political system. A question coming from this conclusion concerns whether or not the US dollar can maintain its position within the world financial system.

When we start trying to insulate ourselves from the world and try and control little pieces of it for ourselves, we tend to lose our place in the bigger picture. This is just another one of the unintended consequences we find in the field of economics.

But it has huge implications for American banks and the United States banking system. Consequently, this has huge implications for investors in the commercial banking industry. And it should be put within the context of what is just happening in the United States.

I guess that banking in 2030 will not look at all like what is going on right now.

Disclosure: I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

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The World Keeps Growing Smaller: The Reinvention Of Finance - Seeking Alpha