The cryptography side of quantum computing is probably the most near-term consequential application -- and it gets less attention than it should
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This community spends a lot of time on algorithms, hardware roadmaps, error correction, and applications in chemistry and optimization. All genuinely interesting. But I think the cryptography implications of quantum computing are the most consequential near-term story and they get treated as a sidebar when they deserve more. The core issue is Shor's algorithm. On a sufficiently powerful fault-tolerant quantum computer it can break RSA and elliptic curve cryptography -- the two algorithms that underpin basically all of current internet security. We do not have that computer today, but the trajectory of the hardware development means this is a planning horizon of years to maybe a decade or two, not a hypothetical. The response on the cryptography side has been moving fast by standards body timelines. NIST finalized post-quantum standards based on lattice and hash-based cryptography last year. These are designed to resist both classical and quantum attacks and can run on existing hardware. The migration work is real and already underway in government and some financial infrastructure. What is underappreciated from a quantum computing perspective is that the cryptographically relevant threshold is much lower than general-purpose quantum advantage. You do not need millions of logical qubits for Shor's to work against real key sizes -- estimates put it somewhere in the thousands of logical qubits range for 2048-bit RSA, which is a lot closer to where the hardware roadmaps are pointing. Roots Analysis puts the quantum cryptography market at USD 0.71 billion in 2025 growing to USD 3.73 billion by 2035 at 18.3% CAGR. A significant portion of that is organizations investing in quantum-safe infrastructure now rather than waiting. From a quantum computing lens, what is your read on realistic timelines for cryptographically relevant machines? That estimate matters a lot for how urgently organizations should be treating migration. submitted by /u/beardsatya [link] [comments]