Google – whose entire business model is built on centralized surveillance to secretly tax everything you do – has published new research on privacy-preserving digital cash.

Anonymous Quantum Tokens with Classical Verification

Google Quantum AI (the authors’ affiliation) is their quantum computing research division. They’re racing against all the other commercially sponsored academics to demonstrate “supremacy” by proving practical quantum applications.

This paper is academic, not a product Google intends to deploy yet, but still worth unpacking.

It’s basically like reading about tobacco companies funding cancer research. It’s like reading about oil companies funding climate research.

Google’s source of income:

• Chrome tracks your browsing
• Android tracks your location
• Gmail scans your email
• Google Ads follows you everywhere
• They’ve lobbied against privacy regulations

This paper:

• Users can detect if they’re being tracked
• Cryptographic guarantees of anonymity
• Explicitly designed to prevent surveillance

This trust scheme requires a trusted bank/issuer to mint and verify tokens. Security comes from quantum mechanics (unconditional) generating tokens that are explicitly one-time-use. There’s no distributed or shared record of all transactions, just the bank’s private verification history. It is like physical cash or centralized payment systems where you trust the issuer yet want anonymity.

Maybe Google will patent it such that it can never happen without them. This is straight from the tech monopoly playbook. See: Google’s codec patents, Apple’s design patents, pharma evergreening.

Or maybe it’s about selling centrally planned and controlled infrastructure. It’s the predatory Oracle database model – you think you’re independent, but you’re codependent on their abusive stack forever.

If a central bank implemented this, would they use Google’s quantum infrastructure? (Vendor lock-in) More importantly, would Google have backdoor access? (National security concerns) What other reasons would Google want this to be realized, since it reduces ad targeting potential? Is it like Coke selling water?

If Google provides the infrastructure, they control the hardware that mints tokens. They could inject distinguishable states at manufacturing, while the “identical token” guarantee depends entirely on trusting Google’s implementation. This is like Juniper routers with NSA backdoors, but quantum.

The question is whether anyone should trust Google-controlled infrastructure for privacy, regardless of the math.

The answer is obviously no.

This theoretical framework for quantum surveillance resistant to mathematical proof is highly vulnerable to implementation compromises in every layer of the stack they control.