Quantum Money

Money, either in the form of bills or information on a computer, should be impossible to copy and also should be verifiable as good money when tendered to a merchant. Quantum mechanics may make this possible to achieve with far greater security than can be achieved without quantum mechanics. Quantum money is a cryptographic protocol in which a mint can produce a quantum state, no one else can copy the state, and anyone (with a quantum computer) can verify that the state came from the mint without sending the money back to the mint. I will present a concrete quantum money scheme based on quantum superpositions of diagrams that encode knots. This scheme is hopefully secure against computationally bounded adversaries.

Anyone outside NIST wishing to attend must be sponsored by a NIST employee and receive a visitor badge.

For more information, contact Kum Ham at 301-975-4203.

Colloquia are videotaped and available in the NIST Research Library.

Peter Shor
Department of Mathematics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology