Comment by jiggawatts

> The universe doesn't need to be "stored" somewhere.

Information that can have any effect on anything physical must have an energy associated with it, because that's basically the definition of energy: the property of physical systems that can cause change over time. No energy, no change in state. These are practically axioms.

Information that has zero energy can have only zero effect on observables in (our) universe.

> It is a theorem that you can only get n bits out of n qubits, and quantum computing speedups do not rely otherwise.

I'm pretty sure you've misunderstood something somewhere, because the 2^n states represented by n qubits is mentioned in practically all QC materials.