BeyondNISQ

Witness hundreds of students from across the world contributing to @OpenQuantum_ as they compete to solve the Quantum Rings Challenge in the 2026 @MIT #iQuHACK event. Won't be long before quantum gigabrains like these are competing for massive payouts on #SN63...

Brunchtensor: Denver Edition Wednesday February 18, 10AM (MST) Brunchtensor is coming to town while ETHDenver is in full swing. If you are in town and looking for a relaxed place to continue conversations outside the main conference, this is for you. We are meeting for an easygoing morning of coffee and conversation. Builders, investors, or anyone curious about the Bittensor ecosystem: are all welcome! luma.com/k7d8k45u Hope to see you there. ☕️ 🥐 $TAO @EthereumDenver #AI #Bittensor

@qBitTensorLabs Podcast tour updating the Bittensor community soon plz! @BeyondNISQ

Well researched and written but not exactly "succinct" @SuccinctJT :-) I want to take a moment to highlight that this is substantially grounded in a single snapshot of where the technology sits today. To give a fair assessment of cryptographic risk accurately, however, snapshots are insufficient. Trends matter, and current trends do suggest a non-trivial chance of a materially more aggressive trajectory than your write-up implies. Innovation Reducing the Required Resources A concrete example is Craig Gidney’s May 2025 paper, “How to factor 2048-bit RSA integers with less than a million noisy qubits.” Under explicit error-correction and architectural assumptions, Gidney shows that a machine with <1 million noisy physical qubits could, in principle, factor RSA-2048 in under a week. For context, this single paper reduced prior resource estimates by more than an order of magnitude, from ~20 million qubits (Gidney–Ekerå 2019) to ~1 million. This is not speculative hype; it is grounded in published fault-tolerant resource modeling, improvements in modular arithmetic, and optimized magic-state management. ArXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2505.15917 Innovation Driving High Quality Logical Qubits On the hardware side, IonQ’s publicly disclosed roadmap now projects fault-tolerant logical qubit counts far beyond trivial scales. According to their 2025–2026 technical disclosures, IonQ targets: ~8,000 logical qubits by 2029 ~80,000 logical qubits by 2030, with very low logical error rates If logical qubits are treated as the relevant, error-corrected computational resource (which you may say is optimistic, and I may agree) then multi-thousand logical-qubit systems within this decade directly challenge the assumption that CRQCs are inherently decades away, even without assuming further algorithmic breakthroughs beyond Gidney’s work. Putting it Together The relevant question, then, is not whether a CRQC exists today, but whether it could plausibly emerge on an accelerated timeline driven by algorithmic innovation and aggressive engineering roadmaps. Taken together, the 2025 resource reductions and public industry plans make it increasingly plausible that conventional public-key cryptography could be threatened before the end of this decade, and likely within the next. In your concluding lines you note: "I won’t argue that a cryptographically relevant quantum computer in five years is literally impossible, only highly unlikely." I agree with this assessment. However, from a traditional risk-mitigation perspective, outcomes that are low probability but high impact cannot be dismissed. For cryptographic systems underpinning critical infrastructure, financial markets, and national security, the appropriate posture is not prediction, but preparedness. This argues for measured, proactive transitions to quantum-resilient cryptography rather than reactive responses once timelines become uncomfortably clear. I should note that your analysis of how Bitcoin is (and is not) vulnerable, and your core distinctions between encryption, signatures, and HNDL risk, are strong and people should be aware of these distinctions.

@dwavequantum Quantum Inc. is moving its corporate headquarters from Palo Alto to Boca Raton, Florida by the end of 2026, establishing a major U.S. R&D facility to support its annealing quantum system roadmap. thequantuminsider.com/2026/01/27/d-w…

Recently published in @Nature, Decoded Quantum Interferometry (DQI), a new quantum algorithm achieving exponential speedup on select optimization problems. Learn more → goo.gle/43v6Nsa