Why the crypto community should pay attention to room-temperature superconductivity

Importance of room-temperature superconductivity for the crypto community

Recently, the term “room-temperature superconductor” has been rapidly spreading and attracting widespread attention worldwide, and investment targets related to this concept have been continuously traded in the capital market.

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

Room-temperature superconductors have long been the holy grail of physics for scientists. Undoubtedly, if this discovery is true, the fourth technological revolution will come, and all electronic devices in human society will need to be replaced, even the most basic wires will need to be replaced, and the rules of all industries will undergo disruptive changes.

The lagging reaction of the capital market

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As a research result that may disrupt the current human society, it can only be confirmed and promoted to the application stage after global peer review and repeated experiments.

However, before the academic community reaches a conclusion, the capital market has unsurprisingly welcomed a frenzy. On August 1st, the American superconductor stock AMSC soared 71% in pre-market trading, with a peak increase of 150%, which is incredibly crazy.

But the capital market, which is known for its sensitivity, has reacted late this time. It wasn’t until the 10th day after the South Korean team published the paper that it made a response. Compared with the previous speculative logic, it was too late. To understand the reasons behind this, let’s review what happened in the ten days after the paper was published.

At the time of the paper’s release, it did not attract much attention.

On the one hand, it was because the script seemed familiar. As early as March of this year, Professor Ranga Dias of the University of Rochester in the United States announced that he had made a room-temperature superconductor, which attracted widespread attention in society. However, many institutions subsequently questioned the conclusion and it was deemed false, so it was dismissed.

On the other hand, the description in the South Korean team’s paper is too fantastical and deviates from the established knowledge of the academic community. Intuitively, I believe that a room-temperature superconductor at normal pressure is cutting-edge technology, and various high-tech must be used in the preparation process.

However, in this paper, the South Korean team’s method is described as comparable to ancient alchemy, which is to throw a bunch of inexpensive powdered materials into a furnace and burn them according to a given ratio. The equipment requirements are as low as a high school laboratory can handle.

Therefore, some academic Twitter influencers have referred to reproducing LK-99 in the laboratory as “Kitchen”, indicating the low threshold of the preparation process.

However, without discussing academics, from the perspective of human nature alone: if this is an academic fraud, the preparation method is too simple, and the deception can be exposed with very little cost and time.

Moreover, there was internal conflict within the Korean team, fighting for the position of the third author (Note: Nobel Prize can only have a maximum of 3 recipients, and the positions of the first and second authors have already been determined), so if the LK-99 superconductor is indeed non-existent, the team would not need to stage such an absurd drama.

Going back to the timeline of the capital market frenzy in the first 10 days, theoretically, it only takes 3 and a half days to produce a sample. But for a full 9 days, no one in the world has produced a sample that matches the description given by the Korean team.

However, on the 10th day, laboratories in China and the United States announced that they had made relatively positive progress in preparing the superconducting crystal LK-99, which led to the capital market’s celebration on August 1st.

Predicting the Landing Time of the LK-99 Preparation Process

If room temperature superconductive materials are truly discovered, how long will it take for us to enjoy this wave of benefits?

To answer this question, we first need to understand why, up until now, only a few micro-sized samples have been synthesized in laboratories around the world. We need to understand why the LK-99 crystal may possess superconducting properties, and also understand why the Korean team is willing to share this technology.

According to superconducting theory, if the special structure in the material can utilize the pressure between particles to lock them together (Cooper Pairs), room temperature superconductivity can be achieved.

The Korean team, through high-temperature firing, happened to create this special structure in a sample, where copper particles enveloped lead particles, thus achieving the superconducting effect. However, this firing method is like a lottery, where only when the particles randomly move to specific positions during the firing process can the Korean team’s film effect be reproduced.

This explains why the seemingly simple preparation process is so difficult to replicate in third-party experiments, and it also explains why the Korean team has been unable to produce a sample for so long.

At the same time, the Korean team’s decision to abandon secrecy and publicly disclose the technical details also makes sense. If, as they have publicly stated, they discovered this LK-99 in 1999 and kept it a secret for all these years, and even failed to produce a presentable sample, there would be a risk of others publishing it before them.

In that case, it is better to just disclose it openly, secure a Nobel Prize spot, and make some money through the patents they have already applied for.

Based on the replication results from laboratories around the world, it is clear that the success rate of using the methods provided in the Korean team’s paper to prepare LK-99 is very low. This lottery-like preparation method is only suitable for the laboratory verification stage.

If it is truly determined in the future that LK-99 possesses superconducting properties, the next step will be for scientists to develop methods for creating a large-scale, low-cost process of enveloping lead particles with copper particles to form special channels. This is not an easy task, and it will require cooperation from governments and industries in various countries in order to achieve large-scale room temperature superconducting materials. Only then can we say that the fourth industrial revolution has truly begun.

And it will take at least 20-30 years for us to popularize superconductors in consumer electronics.

The priority use cases for superconductors are high power and high precision, such as in the military and aerospace industries. In order to promote their use in consumer electronics, clear application scenarios and effective business models need to be determined, and there must be obvious improvements in user experience and profit potential for companies to drive forward.

In addition, the introduction of superconductors also requires upgrades and transformations in the electronic industry chain, such as comprehensive adaptation of power supply, control, interfaces, manufacturing equipment, etc. The entire process of upgrading from materials to components to products requires a long cycle.

Overall, considering the entire process from technology to industrialization to commercialization, it is a reasonable estimate that it will take 20-30 years for superconductors to be widely applied in the research and production of consumer electronics.

Therefore, even if LK-99 possesses superconducting properties in the short term, it will only remain in the laboratory and academic level. The recent hype in the capital market is undoubtedly driven by speculative trading.

The Post-Superconductor Era: AI and Web3 (Blockchain)

Lastly, let’s look ahead and consider what it would mean if humans truly succeed in creating room-temperature superconductors, as well as the impact on other fields of technological innovation.

From a macro perspective, the most immediate impact would be on electrical and electronic products. All equipment and products related to power systems will be upgraded passively, resulting in significant reductions in weight and volume, creating sustained demand for decades.

With such massive demand, superconductors will bring about a trillion-dollar emerging industry. Just replacing the currently inferior motors and wires is already an immensely huge engineering project, which will generate an exceptionally large demand for employment, enough to completely revitalize the currently sluggish world economy, just like when electrification technology transformed the world.

At the same time, it will also reshape the industrial landscape and put traditional industries under pressure to transform.

From a macro perspective, superconductor technology will also reconstruct the global value chain, with technological powerhouses and manufacturing giants having the advantage.

Mastery of superconducting technology will become the key to enhancing a country’s comprehensive strength. It will directly influence a country’s future position in terms of economy, industry, national defense, and other aspects. This will stimulate competition among countries in the field of superconductivity. It will also change the direction and content of trade, with related raw materials becoming new important trade commodities.

Specifically within industries, traditional sectors such as power, electronics, and information will face disruptive impacts. Some emerging industry chains will become new growth drivers under the transformation of traditional industries. Just like the current AI and blockchain, which are receiving the most funding and attention.

Currently, the development of AI is constrained by hardware computing power. Once superconducting materials are applied in the chip industry, it will have a qualitative improvement in computing power. The extent of improvement depends on the depth of human research on superconductivity. Superconductivity has two levels of improvement for electronic circuits:

The first layer is the use of superconducting materials in a similar transistor structure (Superconducting computing). At that time, chips will be faster, performance will be improved by several orders of magnitude, power consumption will be lower, and they can be more densely packed than current traditional transistor packaging. The current scale of AI training will no longer be a problem.

A deeper layer is the exploration of the field of superconducting quantum computing after further research on superconducting properties, which will result in exponential improvement.

Superconducting quantum computing is a branch of solid-state quantum computing and falls within the scope 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 technology. If LK-99 does indeed have superconducting properties, it will be a big step forward in human research on quantum computing.

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

In terms of security, it is important to note that quantum computers are not good at solving hash functions, so they will not be used to mine bitcoins. “Using quantum computers to mine bitcoins” is a common-sense mistake.

The threat of quantum computers to Bitcoin lies not in mining, but in attacking transactions. Quantum computers are very good at solving mathematical problems that current computers cannot solve (or take too long to solve), such as elliptic curve algorithms, which are used in almost all cryptocurrencies or underlying algorithms of blockchain.

It is important to note that it is only a “certain class” of problems, and as long as the elliptic curve is updated to an encryption algorithm that is resistant to quantum computing at the software level, it can be solved.

In addition, from the perspective of cost and benefit, it is actually not cost-effective to use quantum computers to attack the Bitcoin system. The reason is that if the basic security of Bitcoin cannot be guaranteed, the consensus mechanism and user trust that constitute the value foundation of Bitcoin will collapse.

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

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

It can be foreseen that the breakthrough in superconducting materials will undoubtedly accelerate the progress of human civilization. It will not only bring a leap in technological development but also bring more breakthrough growth to existing innovative fields including blockchain and Web3.

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

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