"China’s Ultimate Weapon Against Earth?"
Based on that title alone, what would you guess I’m referring to?
I'll admit, there are almost too many possibilities to imagine. China possesses nearly limitless resources and severely limited ethics.
In many ways, China’s military is the closest competitor to the U.S. military. Just ask our resident defense expert Jason Simpkins all the countless ways China could pose a threat to global security.
But the threat I’m talking about has nothing to do with bombs and missiles.
China could also go scorched earth and use its awesome economic influence as a battering ram, forcing the U.S. to comply. The threat of losing our biggest manufacturing mecca would send the global economy into a tailspin.
But thanks to mutually assured destruction, that’s not the biggest threat China poses. President Xi would never tank his economy in the same way Russia is continuing to do.
China’s most powerful weapon could completely destabilize enemy countries, leaving allies unscathed.
It could destroy economies, influence politicians, and steal the most priceless secrets from any world power.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that if left unchecked, this power could establish China as the most dominant force on Earth.
It’s a threat that has been looming ever since one groundbreaking new piece of technology went mainstream.
But last month, that changed. China’s greatest weapon isn't coming in decades — it could be here this year.
Hey Google, How Do I Destroy the West Without Firing a Shot?
This battle won’t be fought in the physical world. China’s greatest superweapon does its damage in the digital world instead.
According to recent reports, China has managed to create a powerful quantum algorithm that can crunch enough data to break standard RSA-2048 encryption.
RSA-2048 is used in practically every data security use case on Earth. It’s part of the foundation of modern cybersecurity.
In a nutshell, the protocol scrambles sensitive data into an unreadable form using extremely difficult math problems, which the intended receiver can quickly solve (thus decoding the data) with an encryption key.
Whenever you enter personal information into an HTTPS-secure website or app — be it your Social Security number, the password to your online bank account, or an email to your doctor — you’re trusting RSA to keep that information hidden from prying eyes.
Like any encryption algorithm, RSA is theoretically breakable. There has always been a risk that a hacker could decrypt it by manually solving its math problems through trial and error. But doing so would theoretically take an unimaginably long time for typical computers.
These quantum computers, though, are anything but typical.
Security experts estimate that a classical computer would take around 300 trillion years to break a 2048-bit RSA encryption key. But this estimate relies on a deeply flawed assumption: that people won’t invent exponentially more powerful computers in the future.
Those computers are finally here, and China could so far be the only one with this capability. That should terrify every single person reading this.
Now Begins the Great Quantum Arms Race
Hardly a week after the news broke, quantum computers began rolling off Chinese factory lines en masse.
Chinese labs are now creating the hardware AND software needed to bring this magic encryption cracker online. But that doesn't mean the rest of the world is sitting back and watching.
Massive global companies like IBM are hard at work bringing their own systems online. In terms of qubits, the parts of the computer that do the actual processing, IBM’s system blows China’s out of the water.
The U.S. government is also working to establish a set of quantum-proof encryption standards. Some are showing promise, while others have been easily defeated using basic hardware.
Make no mistake — neither side is going to risk losing this war. The amount of funding being poured into quantum computing is absolutely staggering.
Given what's at stake, there’s simply no other choice. Whoever unlocks the secrets of quantum computing first will become the undisputed technological superpower on the planet.
Soon enough, the endless sea of startups and microcaps will start living up to their true potential.
As individual investors, all we have to do is track where that money is going. A huge portion of it will almost definitely go straight to giant corporations like IBM or Texas Instruments. That’s just the way things are in America.
Those are safe bets if you enjoy making money slowly. It’s incredibly unlikely that even $1 billion in funding would raise share prices for multi-faceted corporations like those two.
No, for this young industry we are focusing on the pure plays that aren’t even worth $1 billion to start with. That means even a few million dollars could result in double- or triple-digit gains in a matter of days.
Personally, I would be dumping all my money into the stocks listed here. Our research proves that the new trapped-ion computing technique being developed by this team is the next phase for the quantum computing industry.
