Researcher: Google’s Quantum Breakthrough Could Improve How Proof of Stake (PoS) Works

Google has recently affirmed that it was able to achieve some important breakthroughs in the quantum computing field. Now, a researcher from the University of Texas at Austin, Scott Aaronson, has told Fortune that this kind of progress could improve how the proof of stake technology works.

In case you do not know, proof of stake is a consensus protocol that works by staking tokens instead of mining them. The concept was originally created by Vitalik Buterin to be applied to the Ethereum network, although that never actually happened so far.

As block creators are randomly chosen in this method, a lot of people have criticized how random the method really is. Aaronson affirmed that quantum computing could help to end these doubts, as quantum supremacy could be used to generate numbers which are proved to be random.

Recently, Google published its latest results for the quantum supremacy experiment Sycamore. The computer was able to sample a quantum circuit a million times in only 200 seconds. IBM’s supercomputer would take 10,000 years to do that. With this technology on its side, crypto projects could prove that their proof of stake mechanisms actually worked as intended.

Not everyone is truly convinced that you need to do all that to just to be sure, though. Fortune also interviewed Greg Kuperberg, a professor from the University of California at Davis, who affirmed that the whole thing was overkill. According to him, there are ways to prove random numbers are random even without using such complex technologies.