If room temperature superconducting materials are realized, will it be negative for the encryption market?

By: Fishery Isla, Biteye Core Contributor

Edit: Biteye core contributor Crush

Recently, the term "room-temperature superconductor" is spreading rapidly around the world and attracting widespread attention, and investment targets of related concepts are also continuing to be hotly traded in the capital market.

The whole narrative originated from a paper published by a South Korean scientific research team on July 22, claiming to have discovered the normal-pressure room-temperature superconductor LK-99 crystal, which can achieve superconductivity below 127 degrees Celsius in a normal atmospheric environment, which is almost equal to that in any environment. have superconducting properties.

Room-temperature superconductors have long been the holy grail of physics that scientists have dreamed of for a long time. There is no doubt that if this discovery is true, the fourth technological revolution will come. All electronic devices in the entire human society will need to be replaced, even the most basic wires. , The rules of the game in all industries will also undergo subversive changes.

01. The delayed response of the capital market

As a research result that may subvert the existing human society, it can only be confirmed after peer review and repeated experiments on a global scale, and then advanced to the application stage.

And before the academic circles have come to a conclusion, the capital market is not surprised to usher in a carnival. On August 1, American Superconductor stock AMSC jumped 71% before the market, and the highest increase reached 150%, which is extremely crazy.

However, the capital market, which has always been known as the most sensitive, responded only 10 days after the Korean team released the paper. Compared with the previous hype logic, it came too late. To understand the reason, what happened in the ten days after the publication of the review paper?

When the paper was released, it did not attract much attention.

On the one hand, it is because the script seems familiar. As early as March this year, Professor Ranga Dias of the University of Rochester in the United States announced that he had made a room-temperature superconductor, which aroused widespread concern in the society at that time, and then many institutions came forward to question the conclusion. .

On the other hand, the description in this paper by the Korean team is also too fantastical, breaking away from the established cognition of the academic circle. In my intuition, atmospheric-pressure room-temperature superconductors are ultra-cutting-edge technology, and various high-tech must be used in the preparation process.

But this time the South Korean team’s paper disclosed a method comparable to ancient alchemy, which is to throw a pile of very cheap powder materials into the furnace according to a given ratio and burn them. The equipment requirements are as low as high school laboratories.

Therefore, some of Twitter's academic big Vs will reproduce LK-99's laboratory writing Kitchen (kitchen), which shows that the threshold for realizing the preparation process is low.

However, instead of discussing academics, let’s start from the perspective of human nature alone: if you think about it at a deeper level, if this is academic fraud, the preparation method is too simple, and it only takes a small cost and a small amount of time to expose the deception.

Moreover, the South Korean team had another internal strife, vying for the position of the third author (Note: There can only be a maximum of 3 people in a single Nobel Prize, and the number one and two authors of this study have been determined), so if LK-99 superconductivity is really non-existent , the team can't afford to stage such an absurd script.

Going back to the timeline of 10 days before the capital market carnival, theoretically, samples can be burned in 3 and a half days. But in the first 9 days, the whole world has not burned a sample that meets the description of the South Korean team.

But on the 10th day, the laboratories of China and the United States announced that they had relatively positive results in the preparation of the superconducting crystal LK-99, so the capital market ushered in a carnival on August 1.

02. Predict the landing time from the preparation process of LK-99

If room temperature superconductor materials are really discovered, how long will it take for us to enjoy this wave of dividends?

To answer this question, we first need to understand why so many laboratories around the world have only synthesized a few micron-sized samples so far? Learn why LK-99 crystals may be superconducting. And to figure out why the Korean team is willing to share this technology?

According to the theory of superconductivity, if the special structure in the material can use the pressure between the particles to lock the particles into each other (Cooper pairs), room temperature superconductivity can be realized.

The South Korean team just formed this special structure in a piece of sample through high-temperature firing, that is, copper particles wrap lead particles, thus realizing the superconducting effect. But this firing method is like a lottery ticket. Only when the particles randomly walk to a specific position during the firing process can the Korean team's film effect be reproduced.

So this explains why the seemingly simple preparation process is so difficult for third-party reproduction experiments, and it also explains why the Korean team has been unable to produce samples for a long time.

At the same time, the South Korean team gave up secrecy, and the operation of disclosing the technical details made sense. Because if, as they disclosed, this kind of LK-99 was discovered in 1999, and it has been kept secret for so many years, even the samples that can be obtained cannot be burned. If it continues to be kept secret, there is a risk of being released by others.

That being the case, it is better to disclose it directly, lock up the number of Nobel Prizes, and earn a fortune from the patents that you have applied for in advance.

From the current reproduction results of global laboratories, it is enough to see that the success rate of preparing LK-99 using the method provided by the Korean team's paper is low. This lottery-style preparation method is only suitable for the laboratory demonstration stage.

If it is really confirmed that LK-99 has superconducting properties in the future, the next step is for scientists to develop a large-scale and low-cost method to make copper particles encase lead particles to form special channels. This is not an easy task. Only with the cooperation of the industry can the large-scale use of room temperature superconducting materials be realized. Until then, what we call the fourth technological revolution will only be kicking off.

However, it will take at least 20-30 years for the popularization of superconductivity in consumer electronic products that we can use.

The preferred scenarios for superconductors are high power and high precision, such as military and aerospace fields. To promote it to consumer electronics, it is necessary to determine a clear application scenario and an effective business model. Only when there is a significant improvement in user experience and profit margins can companies advance.

In addition, the introduction of superconductors also requires the upgrading and transformation of the electronics industry chain, such as the comprehensive adaptation of power supply, control, interface, and manufacturing equipment. The entire upgrade from materials to components to products requires a long cycle.

On the whole, in the whole process from technology to industrialization to commercialization, 20-30 years is a reasonable estimated period for the large-scale application of superconductors to develop and produce civilian electronic products.

Therefore, in the short term, even if LK-99 has superconducting properties, it is only at the laboratory and academic level. The turmoil in the capital market this time is undoubtedly oriented by speculation.

03. AI and Web3 (Blockchain) in the post-superconducting era

Finally, let's look forward to what it means if humans really create room temperature superconductors? and other areas of technological innovation.

Macroscopically, the most intuitive is the impact on electrical and electronic products. All equipment and products related to power systems will be passively upgraded, and their weight and volume will be greatly reduced, forming a continuous demand for decades.

With such a huge demand, superconductors will bring about trillions of emerging industries. Just replacing the current motor wires with outdated performance is an extremely huge project, and the demand for employment will be extremely large, enough to Thoroughly activating the current sluggish world economy is like electrification technology transforming the whole world.

At the same time, it will reshape the industrial structure and put many traditional industries under the pressure of transformation.

Macroscopically, in addition, superconductor technology will restructure the global value chain, and technological powers and manufacturing powers will take advantage of it.

Mastering superconducting technology will be the key to enhancing the country's comprehensive strength. It will directly affect a country's future status in terms of economy, industry, and national defense. This will stimulate competition among countries in the field of superconductivity. It will also change trade flow and trade content, and related raw materials will become new important trade commodities.

Specific to the industry, traditional power, electronics, information and other fields will face disruptive impact. Some emerging industrial chains will become new growth points under the transformation of traditional industries. For example, AI and blockchain are the most funded and most popular at the moment.

At present, the development of AI is limited by the computing power of hardware. Once superconducting materials are applied in the chip industry, the computing power will be qualitatively improved. How much it is improved depends on the depth of human research on superconductivity. Superconductivity has two levels of improvement for electronic circuits:

The first layer is to use superconducting computing in a similar transistor structure. At that time, the chip will be faster, the performance will be several times higher, the power consumption will be lower, and it can be compared with the current traditional Transistors are packed more densely. Existing AI training scale will no longer be a problem.

And a deeper level is to open up the field of quantum superconducting computing (Superconducting quantum computing) after further research on the properties of superconductivity, which will be an exponential improvement.

Superconducting quantum computing is a branch of solid-state quantum computing, the category of quantum computers. It uses superconducting qubits as artificial atoms, or quantum dots, to realize superconducting electronic circuits.

Internet and chip giants such as Google, IBM, and Intel have been researching superconducting quantum computing for a long time and have accumulated some technologies. If LK-99 does have superconducting properties, then human research on quantum computing will take a big step forward.

When it comes to quantum computers, we have to talk about the impact on the blockchain.

In terms of security, make it clear that quantum computers will not be used to mine bitcoins because they are not good at solving hash functions. "Quantum computers are used to mine Bitcoin" is a common sense mistake.

The threat of quantum computers to Bitcoin lies not in mining, but in attacks on transactions. Quantum computers are very good at a certain type of mathematical problems that current computers cannot solve (for too long), such as the elliptic curve algorithm, which is the underlying algorithm of almost all digital currencies or blockchains.

Note that it is "a certain type". In fact, it is only necessary to update the elliptic curve to an encryption algorithm that is resistant to quantum computing from the software level.

In addition, from the perspective of cost and benefit, it is actually uneconomical to use quantum computers to attack the Bitcoin system. The reason is that if the underlying security of Bitcoin cannot be guaranteed, the consensus mechanism and user trust that form the basis of Bitcoin's value will collapse.

When Bitcoin loses its value support, it will also become worthless. At that time, even if the attacker can get all the bitcoins, since they are worthless, the attack will be completely meaningless, and it is just a dream.

On the contrary, the blockchain infrastructure DePIN will also benefit from superconductivity. Imagine that through superconducting technology, hardware efficiency can be greatly improved, zk computing, decentralized storage, decentralized transmission, etc., will usher in another revolution in productivity. The confirmation time of the blockchain becomes microseconds, the gas cost of the blockchain drops by 100 times, and Web3 will usher in the iPhone moment of real Mass adoption.

It is foreseeable that the breakthrough of superconducting materials will surely accelerate the progress of human civilization. It will not only bring a leap in technological development, but also bring more breakthrough growth to existing innovation fields including blockchain and Web3.

What we can do now is to wait for the good news from the academic world.