Scott Aaronson, a scientist at MIT who works mostly with theoretical quantum computers, issued a challenge to all of those deniers out there: prove that "scaleable quantum computing is impossible in the physical world," and Aaronson will personally pony up $100,000 to the winner.

When quantum computers eventually reach larger scales, they'll probably remain pretty precious resources, locked away in research institutions just like our classical supercomputers. So anyone who wants to perform quantum calculations will likely have to do it in the cloud, remotely accessing a quantum server somewhere else. A new double-blind cryptography method would ensure that these calculations remain secret. It uses the uncertain, unusual nature of quantum mechanics as a double advantage.