I'm a software engineer with 40 years of experience, and I can assure you that this video is a thick layer of bullshit spread unevenly over a rotting pile of hype. I would advise either not following this person, or watching their videos then doing the exact opposite of everything they say.
If we had quantum computers of sufficient capability, all current forms of encryption would indeed become useless overnight. However, we're nowhere close to being able to produce and operate general-purpose quantum computers powerful and reliable enough to bring this about. All the quantum computer breakthroughs that have made headlines so far are at best proof-of-concept devices. 1/
"The long-term goal for quantum computing is to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer. ... However, there are still many known and unknown engineering and physics problems yet to be solved before the community can build a fault-tolerant quantum computer capable of running quintillions of circuit operations per second." 1/
It's a really exciting, but still partial, proof of concept. It is not a market-ready reliable computer, nor will it become one directly. But it's on the path that might get us there. As a crude analogy, if reliable large scale general-purpose quantum computing is the iPhone, the device we're discussing is a buggy, crash-prone prototype of the Apple II. 2/2
If I haven't said this before, Catherine, thank you for your knowledge, your wisdom, and for your ability to explain complex technical situations clearly.
These are of course amazing achievements, and may well be important steps along a path that will eventually lead to practical general-purpose quantum computers. But estimates I trust put that a decade from now at minimum.
Beneath that, key breaking is so far down the crypto threat list as to be negligible. The world of crypto is almost entirely a tangle of financial fraud, Ponzi schemes, and simple ineptitude. You'd be better off investing in tulip futures. 🙂🌷 2/2
Knowing next to zero about the tech, I understand what dark money is used for and have been vehemently against crypto from the beginning. Then a friend who works with a women’s foundation explained it was the #1 currency of sex traffickers. After seeing celebrities pump & dump it I was even more assured of my position.
Thank you for taking the time to explain that to me :)
The funny thing is that SHA-256 is already broken in theory. Shor's Algorithm and related approaches can easily crack all currently deployed forms of cryptography. The practical problem is that we can't yet build a quantum computer large and reliable enough to use these algorithms to break real-world cryptography. We're in a position similar to that of Ada Lovelace, writing programs more than a century before any computer was capable of running them.
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