If room temperature superconducting materials can be realized, will it have a negative impact on the cryptocurrency market?

Will room temperature superconducting materials negatively affect the cryptocurrency market?

Author: Biteye Core Contributor Fishery Isla

Editor: Biteye Core Contributor Crush

Recently, the term “room-temperature superconductor” is spreading rapidly worldwide and attracting widespread attention. Investment targets related to the concept are also experiencing continuous hot trading 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, LK-99, which can achieve superconductivity below 127 degrees Celsius in normal atmospheric conditions, almost possessing superconducting characteristics in any environment.

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Room-temperature superconductors have long been the holy grail of 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 changed, and the game rules of all industries will undergo disruptive changes.

01. Capital Market’s Lagging Reaction

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

However, even before the academic community reached a conclusion, the capital market unsurprisingly began to celebrate. On August 1, the US superconductor stock AMSC jumped 71% before the market opened, with a maximum increase of 150%, which was incredibly crazy.

However, the capital market, known for its sensitivity, reacted late this time. It is too late compared to the previous speculation logic. To understand the reasons behind this, let’s review what happened in the ten days after the publication of the paper.

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

On the one hand, it is because the script seems 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 identified it as a mistake, and the matter was dropped.

On the other hand, the description in the paper by the South Korean team is too fantastic and deviates from the established knowledge in the academic community. Based on my intuition, room-temperature superconductors are cutting-edge technology, and various high-tech should be used in the preparation process.

However, in this paper, the South Korean team revealed a method comparable to ancient alchemy, which is to burn a bunch of inexpensive powder materials in a furnace according to a given ratio. The equipment requirements are as low as a high school laboratory.

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

However, leaving aside academia and looking at it from the perspective of human nature: thinking deeper, if this is academic fraud, the preparation method is too simple, and the deception can be exposed with very little cost and time.

Moreover, there was infighting within the Korean team, vying for the position of the third author (Note: the 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 LK-99 superconductivity is indeed a fabrication, the team wouldn’t need to stage such a ridiculous drama.

Returning to the timeline of the capital market frenzy in the first 10 days, theoretically it would only take 3 and a half days to produce a sample. However, for a full 9 days, no sample that meets the description provided by the Korean team has been produced anywhere in the world.

But on the 10th day, laboratories in both China and the United States announced that they had achieved more positive results in the preparation of the superconducting crystal LK-99, leading to a frenzy in the capital market on August 1st.

02. Predicting the Timeframe for the Implementation of the LK-99 Preparation Process

If room temperature superconducting materials are indeed discovered, how long will it take for us to enjoy the 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 worldwide. We also need to understand why the LK-99 crystal may possess superconducting properties, as well as why the Korean team is willing to share this technology.

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

The Korean team happened to form this special structure in a sample through high-temperature firing, where copper particles enveloped lead particles, thereby achieving the superconducting effect. However, this firing process is like a lottery, as the particles need to randomly move to specific positions during the firing process to reproduce the effects shown in the Korean team’s video.

This explains why the seemingly simple preparation process becomes 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 they had discovered this LK-99 in 1999 and kept it secret all these years, and even failed to produce presentable samples, there would be a risk of someone else releasing it ahead of them.

In that case, it is better to just disclose it openly, secure a Nobel Prize spot, and profit from the patents they have already applied for in advance.

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

If it is confirmed in the future that LK-99 possesses superconducting properties, the next step will be for scientists to research a method for mass-producing copper particles enveloping lead particles to form special channels at a low cost. This is not an easy task, and it will require cooperation from governments and industries in various countries to ultimately achieve large-scale room temperature superconducting materials. Only then will the so-called fourth technological revolution truly begin.

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

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

In addition, the introduction of superconductors also requires the upgrading and transformation of the electronic industry chain, including comprehensive adaptation of power supply, control, interface, manufacturing equipment, etc. The entire upgrade process 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 estimation period of 20-30 years for the large-scale application of superconductors in the research and production of consumer electronic products.

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

03, AI and Web3 (Blockchain) in the Post-Superconducting Era

Finally, let’s look ahead to what it really means if humans do manufacture room-temperature superconductors, as well as the impact on other areas of technological innovation.

On a macro level, the most direct impact is on electrical and electronic products. All devices and products related to the power system will undergo passive upgrades, with significant reductions in weight and volume, creating sustained demand for decades.

Under such massive demand, superconductors will bring about a trillions-scale emerging industry. Even replacing the currently outdated motors and wires alone is an immensely huge engineering task, resulting in an exceptionally large demand for employment, enough to completely revitalize the currently sluggish global economy, just like how electrification technology transformed the world back then.

It will also reshape the industrial landscape and put traditional industries under transformation pressure.

On a macro level, superconductor technology will reconstruct the global value chain, with technological powerhouses and manufacturing giants enjoying advantages in this domain.

Mastery of superconductor technology will become the key to enhancing a country’s overall strength. It will directly influence a country’s future position in terms of economy, industry, and national defense. This will spark competition among countries in the field of superconductors. It will also change trade flows and trade content, with related raw materials becoming new important trade commodities.

Specifically in industries, traditional sectors such as power, electronics, and information will face disruptive impacts. Some emerging industry chains will become new growth points under the transformation of traditional industries. Take AI and blockchain, which are currently receiving the most funding and attention, for example.

Currently, the development of AI is limited by hardware computing power. Once superconducting materials are applied in the chip industry, it will significantly enhance computing power. The extent of improvement depends on the depth of human research on superconductors. Superconductors have 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, the chip will be faster, the performance will increase by several orders of magnitude, the power consumption will be lower, and it can be more densely packaged than the current traditional transistors. The current scale of AI training will no longer be a problem.

The deeper layer is the further research on superconducting properties, opening up the field of superconducting quantum computing. This will be an exponential improvement.

Superconducting quantum computing is a branch of solid-state quantum computing and the realm 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, human research on quantum computing will take a big step forward.

Speaking of quantum computers, we have to talk about their impact on blockchain.

In terms of security, it should be clear that quantum computers are not good at solving hash functions, so they will not be used to mine Bitcoin. “Quantum computers used to mine Bitcoin” is a common misconception.

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 currently cannot be solved by computers (because it takes too long), such as elliptic curve algorithms, which are the algorithms underlying almost all digital currencies or blockchain.

Note that it is “a certain class”. In fact, as long as the elliptic curve is updated from the software level to an encryption algorithm resistant to quantum computing, 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, this attack will be completely meaningless, just a dream.

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

It can be foreseen that the breakthrough of 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 for good news from the academic community.

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