Quantum computing
Computing that uses quantum-mechanical phenomena — superposition and entanglement — to process information in ways classical bits cannot.
A classical bit is either 0 or 1. A qubit can be in a superposition of both until measured, and multiple qubits can be entangled so their states are correlated regardless of distance. Certain algorithms exploit this to solve specific problems — factoring large integers, simulating molecules, optimizing combinatorial spaces — exponentially faster than any known classical approach. The hard part is decoherence: qubits are fragile; noise from the environment collapses the quantum state before computation finishes. Practical fault-tolerant machines require error correction, which demands far more physical qubits per logical qubit than current hardware can supply.
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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.
The TSMC of quantum
IBM and the Commerce Department are spinning out Anderon, a $2B foundry in Albany meant to fab quantum chips for the whole industry — borrowing the split that let ordinary chips scale.
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