Post-quantum cryptography
Encryption algorithms designed to stay secure against attacks from quantum computers.
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Most public-key cryptography in use today — RSA, elliptic-curve — rests on math problems (factoring large numbers, discrete logarithm) that a sufficiently large quantum computer could solve quickly using Shor's algorithm. Post-quantum cryptography replaces those with problems — lattice-based, hash-based, code-based — believed hard for both classical and quantum machines. NIST finalized its first post-quantum standards in 2024. The hard part is not the math: it is migrating years of deployed infrastructure before cryptographically-relevant quantum hardware arrives.
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The qubit count just collapsed
Breaking the encryption behind HTTPS and crypto wallets was thought to need millions of quantum qubits. A new resource estimate puts the floor at tens of thousands — the scale labs already run today.
The 9-minute window
When you spend Bitcoin, the transaction broadcasts your public key to the network for about nine minutes before it confirms — long enough, this paper argues, for a future quantum computer to derive your private key and steal the coins mid-transaction.
The qubit drop that mostly isn't
An eight-person Sydney startup estimates it could factor RSA-2048 with under 100,000 quantum qubits — a hundredth of the count assumed in 2019, and the headline everyone ran with.
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