i do think that somebody can make a pivot to work in quantum computing after college. that being said, i think that somebody 15 years out of college, with a family and house, will probably not be reading textbooks or deep theory papers. there should be better ways of evaluating expertise here!

there are whole communities on other websites of people discussing investing 10s of thousands of dollars into companies like IONQ with such tenuous understandings of how quantum computing actually works. i find it kind of sad.

there just isn't a great platform to fight back against these claims. it also doesn't help that a few quantum computing companies participated in the SPAC boom and now have armies of fans on social media repeating these claims.

i don't know how to solve this! businesses keep hiring quantum consultants who don't really know what they're talking about. the "BS hype" side of quantum computing has a way bigger platform than the more conservative academic side of the field.

this has led to a quantum industry with an insane amount of BS. claims like "quantum computing will revolutionize logistics and finance" or "AES-128 is in imminent danger of being cracked by a quantum computer" are widely accepted even though there just isn't evidence for this.

when I went to RWPQC (a conference about post-quantum crypto) I saw a bunch of people in category 1 of varying quality, and a few people who i'm pretty sure were in category 2.

the result is: there are a lot of "quantum consultants" with surprisingly shitty understandings of these subjects.
At best, you have a traditional security person who made a mid-late career pivot to quantum, and at worst, you have people who are more or less just grifters.

however, quantum computing and post-quantum crypto are pretty rare skills. Many universities don't offer courses on these topics, and they weren't that widely taken at both universities that i attended. people who take these classes are at the top of the class and typically don't go into consulting

1) I've seen people bring up "KZG for multilinear polynomials" or "Multilinear KZG" a few times, but they weren't quite sure what it is or where it comes from. It originates in this 2011 paper called "Signatures of Correct Computation" (eprint.iacr.org/2011/587.pdf) and is sometimes also called PST.

CONIKS: Bringing Key Transparency to End Use (eprint.iacr.org/2014/1004.pdf). I spent a few months reading key transparency papers and I think this is the best one. It's easy to read and well thought out. If you've seen CONIKs before, I think SEEMless is another fun one (eprint.iacr.org/2018/607).

Justin Thaler's textbook on zero-knowledge proofs (people.cs.georgetown.edu/jthaler/Proo...). This textbook spends the first 7 chapters on sumcheck stuff, which may be intimidating. However, it has the best-written explanations for a lot of stuff and you can read the non-sumcheck stuff separately.

Nova: Recursive Zero-Knowledge Arguments
from Folding Schemes (eprint.iacr.org/2021/370.pdf). This paper is super readable and introduces a hot current idea in zk-SNARK research!

Reef: Fast Succinct Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge Regex Proofs (eprint.iacr.org/2023/1886). I think this is a phenomenal applied zk-SNARK paper. They thought of everything and there's a lot of cool optimizations in here.

thanks! my role on this paper was "SGX monkey", deepak has worked on follow-up research to this for a few years now