Honest question how worried should we actually be about quantum computers breaking encryption?
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I've been going down a rabbit hole on post-quantum cryptography lately and I genuinely don't know how alarmed to be. On one hand, researchers keep saying we're still 10–15 years away from a cryptographically relevant quantum computer. On the other hand, I keep reading about harvest now, decrypt later attacks, where adversaries are allegedly collecting encrypted data today with the plan to crack it once the hardware catches up. And if that's real, then the window to act isn't in the future. It already opened. Most of the internet still runs on RSA and elliptic curve cryptography. If either of those falls, we're talking about broken TLS, broken digital signatures, broken crypto wallets basically the entire security layer of the internet becoming unreliable overnight. NIST finalized its first post-quantum cryptography standards last year (ML-KEM, ML-DSA, SLH-DSA). But adoption feels painfully slow. Banks, governments, critical infrastructure, blockchains, how many have actually started migrating? From what I can tell, almost none. What I find particularly unsettling is the blockchain angle. Every transaction on a public chain is permanent and public. Once a powerful enough quantum computer exists, every wallet with an exposed public key becomes a potential target and your public key gets exposed the moment you transact. There's no patching old blocks. It's immutable by design. I'm not trying to be alarmist. But between the harvest-now-decrypt-later threat, the glacial pace of enterprise migration, and the structural vulnerability of public blockchains this feels like a slow-motion crisis that nobody's treating with the urgency it deserves. Am I overreacting? What are people actually doing about this at an organizational or personal level? submitted by /u/Rare_Rich6713 [link] [comments]