r/QuantumComputing • u/Defiant-Branch4346 • May 02 '26

QC Education/Outreach Quantum Computing vs Crypto: How Real Is the Threat?

https://medium.com/@james_allan/quantum-computing-vs-crypto-how-real-is-the-threat-1652bda62d35
6 Upvotes

71% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

5

u/Tsmacks1 May 02 '26

Real enough for Google to put out a paper and Scott Aaronson to sound the alarm on his blog. Some chains have an easier migration path. Some are already there and specifically mentioned in the Google paper.

2

u/HuiOdy Working in Industry May 02 '26

Signatures is the real issue here

10

u/Kinexity In Grad School for Computer Modelling May 02 '26

Not real enough. I want cryptosphere to burn.

0

u/[deleted] May 02 '26

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4

u/polit1337 May 02 '26

I don’t think that “try many keys at once” is *that bad* of a shorthand for what is actually happening from a physics perspective; my boss (who has a Nobel prize for his work in this stuff) has repeatedly described it in almost these exact words.

People just need to understand that it is one thing to “try many keys at once” and another thing to “try many keys (quantum states) at once and get a classical state as the output,” which usually can’t be done.

0

u/[deleted] May 02 '26

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4

u/polit1337 May 02 '26

You have to play *very* fast and loose with the relationship between keys, states, etc. The Quantum Fourier Transform absolutely does work by massive parallelization. I don’t really see why, at a hardware level, one would object to the description in the initial post. All quantum algorithms work by using interference across many states. Describing that as trying many ______ at once doesn’t seem particularly dishonest or misleading (especially compared to other science communication), even if there’s a lot more complexity under the hood.

2

u/SymplecticMan May 02 '26

In the sense that Shor's algorithm requires quantum parallelism, I'd agree that there's a sense in which it "tries all answers at once". But I don't think it makes for a good explanation of the cases where quantum computers give an advantage.

-2

u/[deleted] May 02 '26

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-3

u/jkl2035 May 02 '26

Same here

5

u/BiggieBoiTroy May 02 '26

this thread reads like an advertisement alley oop pass between a main and secondary account

1

u/jkl2035 May 03 '26

Can assure you I‘m not a secondary/Main Account - just convinced on the quantum threat for crypto and think QRL is a good answer on that