this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

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The whole promise is that reversible computation is theoretically free (in quantum information theory) , quantum computer can exploit it by using quantum superposition to brute force 256bit key (and larger) in a single computation cycle.

There's a massive fundamental flaw in the reasoning behind this.

It's the second law of thermodynamics - entropy always increases. While computation is free, reversal of entropy isn't. What we're being promised is a 21st century version of perpetual motion machine.

Additional explanation:

Think about private key as low entropy, and public key as high entropy. Owner of the private key has cheat code in the form of missing information which allows reversing the entropy of public key.

However in order to break the cryptography you have to reverse public key back into private key without having access to it. The regualr way is to search for flaws in the cryptography scheme that allow reasoning about missing information and consecutively - private key recovery.

But if you do a brute force attack you are 100% forced to pay full thermodynamical price of reversing the entropy. And 2^256 is way, way more than you could ever afford. Even Planck scale values multiplied by that number grow into universe size and beyond.

In summary, quantum computing can skip time component of brute forcing a key, but it can't skip the energy costs. So it will never happen.

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[–] Natanael@infosec.pub 1 points 5 days ago

Actually, it kinda is the same. The math between information entropy and physics entropy are identical and align when you describe physics in particular ways

But entropy in information theory does not behave the same way after a sequence of operations as entropy in physics, and that's because operations in information theory does not behave like physical interactions.