10 ms·

Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools

265 points by Strilanc 6mo ago

Overpower0416 6mo ago
Sooo it’s essentially claiming that the impossible thing is essentially a bit less impossible, but currently still impossible. Nice
- falcor84 6mo ago
  The whole thing is that we have proofs that this is possible, and have been seeing continuous engineering progress. Having followed this for awhile, it seems to me that saying quantum computing is "still impossible" at this stage is like saying that GTA VI is still impossible, based on its unpredictable timelines.
  - Overpower0416 6mo ago
    Sorry, I meant a quantum computer that is actually built where these theories can actually be applied. Current quantum computers are as useful as current nuclear fusion reactors. I am just over any sensational headlines from the past 10 years. They really need to drop a tweet like "Check out my quantum computer that is actually useful" like Sam Altman did with GPT to convince me.
    - Foobar8568 6mo ago
      At this stage, it's more like Musk and self driving cars, but at least QC around the corner is from mid 1990s
    - falcor84 6mo ago
      Well yes, but this is research - it progresses gradually and incrementally until eventually it is ready to be deployed. I for one am really interested in following these progress updates, rather than just being surprised when it finally drops. In particular, I find the recommendation to switch to quantum-resistant technology to be very important.
nebben64 5mo ago
I'm 6 days late but if anyone reads this: what does it mean we should "upgrade now to quantum-resistant cryptography" ? If I'm using RSA am I supposed to switch to something else?
ChrisArchitect 6mo ago
Related: Discussion on the Google one, Safeguarding cryptocurrency by disclosing quantum vulnerabilities responsibly https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47582418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47582418
tombert 6mo ago
Here's hoping that my stock for D-Wave ends up being worth something. Quantum computing seems super cool, but I've been a little skeptical of it actually ever yielding anything useful. I would love to be wrong, it seems neat, and I have read through a few books on the subject and played with simulators, so I'm not completely talking out of my ass here, but quantum as a whole has kind of felt like vaporware to me. As I said, I have stock in D-Wave, obviously it would be in my best interest for quantum to end up as cool as it seems.
- esseph 6mo ago
  You can rent Quantum computing time from IBM cloud today: https://www.ibm.com/quantum/products https://www.ibm.com/quantum/products https://quantum.cloud.ibm.com/docs/en/guides/plans-overview https://quantum.cloud.ibm.com/docs/en/guides/plans-overview I have NOT used it, but the idea is interesting.
  - AlexCoventry 6mo ago
    You can rent it, but it's basically worthless at this stage.
    - pathOf_aFineMan 6mo ago
      there's still a long road to commercial applications but today's hardware is simulating quantum systems beyond the scale of classical methods, for example [1]; an interesting line of work opposite to this can be found in those who improve classical methods towards such examples [2], but these are only developed because of the existing quantum hardware Really though, today's IBM hardware is good fun to play with, eg for generating moderately large GHZ states [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26845 https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26845 [2]https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.14887 https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.14887
    - cbm-vic-20 6mo ago
      Is there anything you can do on a rented QC that you can't do cheaper on a simulated QC on a "classical" CPU/GPU today?
pmarreck 6mo ago
Can quantum computing do even basic math yet? I think this was the holdup. Or perhaps I'm missing the point.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- GeoSys 6mo ago
  It doesn't do basic math ... just the hard one :)
- bawolff 6mo ago
  > I think this was the holdup It isn't...
- georgeburdell 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - qnleigh 6mo ago
    This comment is wildly inappropriate and violates the community guidelines here. I suggest you delete it.
- qnleigh 6mo ago
  This is a good question, and currently the answer is no. Quantum computers can only run very short, simple algorithms right now, because the qubits they're built out of are noisy. You need a lot of error correction, which the community is working on. The thing is, unlike ordinary computers, quantum computers can factor numbers about as easily as they can multiply them. So as soon as they can multiply two large integers, they'll also be able to factor the result and break RSA encryption based on keys of that size. This blog post gives a good sense of the state of the art and what progress might look like: Why haven't quantum computers factored 21 yet? https://algassert.com/post/2500 https://algassert.com/post/2500
  - Foobar8568 6mo ago
amluto 6mo ago
One thing I find rather amazing about all of this is the degree to which the Bitcoin community has tried, for years, to claim that quantum computers will be another other than a complete break. Sure, it takes a pretty nice quantum computer or a pretty good algorithm or a degree of malice on the part of miners to break pay-to-script-hash if your wallet has the right properties, but that seems like a pretty weak excuse for the fact that the entire scheme is broken, completely, by QC. Does there even exist a credible post-quantum proof protocol that could be used to “rescue” P2SH wallets?
- Strilanc 6mo ago
  The best proposal I have heard for rescuing P2SH wallets after cryptographically relevant quantum computers exist is to require vulnerable wallets to precommit to transactions a day ahead of time. The precommitment doesn't reveal the public key. When the public key must be exposed as part of the actual transaction, an attacker cannot redirect the transaction for at least one day because they don't have a valid precommitment to point to yet.
  - warkdarrior 6mo ago
    24-hour latency to make a payment? What is this, the 20th century?
    - Strilanc 6mo ago
      This is for rescue, not for payment. Once you've moved the coins to quantum-secure wallet, the delay would no longer be needed. ...probably some people would be very inconvenienced by this. But not as inconvenienced as having the coins stolen or declared forever inaccessible.
      - daveguy 6mo ago
        > ...probably some people would be very inconvenienced by this. But not as inconvenienced as having the coins stolen or declared forever inaccessible. I don't know why anyone f's around with crypto anymore. So many caveats, such a scammy ecosystem. It just doesn't seem worth the trouble to support a ransomware and money laundering tool.
socketcluster 6mo ago
Maybe it's a good time to start promoting my 5 year old, lightweight, hand-crafted, battle-tested, quantum-resistant blockchain: https://capitalisk.com/ https://capitalisk.com/ It's about 5000 lines of custom code. Crypto signature library written from scratch.
- EdwardDiego 6mo ago
  > Crypto signature library written from scratch. That's a sentence every white hat cryptography enthusiast loves to hear lol.
  - socketcluster 6mo ago
    It's a very simple signature algorithm. They're welcome to try and crack it. If there is an issue with it, it shouldn't be hard to identify within those few hundred lines. Nobody found any issues in the last 5 years though. Isn't it a good thing that there exists at least one blockchain in the world which isn't based on the same crypto library used by every other project? What if those handful of libraries have a backdoor? What if the narrative that "you shouldn't roll out your own crypto" is a psyop to get every project to depend on the same library in order to backdoor them all at once at some future date? Strange how finance people always talk about hedging but in tech, nobody is hedging tech.
    - Nevermark 6mo ago
      > What's wrong with hedging? To be (an actual) hedge, something needs to be very solidly understood (by the purchaser), a very solid investment in its own right, and either reverse correlated or independently correlated specifically with a particular asset being hedged. And not based on analysis of one "hedging" scenario, because both are going to be owned over a huge distribution of scenarios. Probably the worst indicator of an investment being credible, is a promoter who has to stoop to the floor to ask "What's wrong with hedging?", as if that manipulative bon mot was ever in question, or was the relevant question. If a motivated promoter can only make a very bad case, believe them. And, if an "expert" attempts to get respect for their work from non-experts, instead of from other experts, there is something very wrong. Because the former makes no sense. -- If you don't know how to get respect from experts, study more, and figure out how to trash what you have. Counterintuitive. But if you have anything original right, thats how to find it. Identify it. Purify it. And be in a better position to build again, with just a little more leverage, and repeat. Or communicate it clearly to someone qualified to judge it. You won't have to persuade anyone. If you have to persuade someone, either you don't have something, or you don't understand what you have well enough to properly identify and communicate it. You have ambition. You have motivation. You have interest. You follow through and build. That is it. Don't stop. Ego derails ambition. Kill your darlings. Keep going.
GeoSys 6mo ago
So does BTC need to hard fork? Good luck getting to a consensus again ...
- r4indeer 6mo ago
  If QC gets to the point where breaking RSA and ECC in the real world is actually going to happen, I'd imagine you will find a consensus rather quickly.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
- haakon 6mo ago
  If an upgrade becomes necessary, it would be a soft fork. (Consensus would still be a challenge)
- sMarsIntruder 6mo ago
  I’m impressed by the BTC obsession: this will definitely impact the banking sector as a whole even before. Quantum FUD, here we come.
  - tsimionescu 6mo ago
    The banking sector can relatively trivially move to a new encryption scheme - this is one of the huge advantages of centralized systems. Also, the banking sector, rather than trying to provide anonymity/pseudonimity, has KYC - they can relatively simply disable remote access if they think a current system is no longer secure, and get everyone to come in to a physical office and get a secure version, after manually verifying they are the rightful holder of the account. Tldr; Bitcoin relies entirely on encryption, banking does not. So broken encryption is a catastrophe for Bitcoin, but just a bad week for banking.
    - zahlman 6mo ago
      > they can relatively simply disable remote access if they think a current system is no longer secure, and get everyone to come in to a physical office After all these years of it not being required? I think that's... very naive with regard to how clients would respond.
freetonik 6mo ago
I worked at a quantum computing company that builds superconducting QC chips (so, not really applicable to one of the “bombshells” from the article). My team was designing the software stack which allows to control the QC, run quantum jobs/algorithms, and calibrate the parameters. I’ve made two attempts to explain the work we’ve been doing and to explain the current realistic state of the industry: 1. A talk at PyCon: https://youtu.be/tT1YLP5T71Y https://youtu.be/tT1YLP5T71Y 2. A free ebook “ Quantum Computing For Software Engineers” https://leanpub.com/quantum-computing-for-software-engineers https://leanpub.com/quantum-computing-for-software-engineers The company I left a few months ago is planning its IPO this year. Like almost all other quantum companies, it’s gonna be a SPAC merger, not a pure IPO. Those traded companies mentioned in the other comments are mostly SPACs as well.
- sigmoid10 6mo ago
  If they're going public I imagine they already sell some kind of QC chips. But, like, who buys them? Yesterday there was a new paper [1] that shows how Shor's algorithm could break realistic encryptions with as little as 10,000 qubits (instead of millions), but as far as I know quantum hardware is still orders of magnitude below even that target. So how big can the market actually be? Shipping to universities or other QC companies for playing around with some actual hardware is nice and all, but in the end someone will be left holding the bag. There is zero profit to be made at the end of the chain. [1] https://arxiv.org/html/2603.28627v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2603.28627v1
  - freetonik 6mo ago
    During my 3.7 years at the company, we had dozens of sales of full-stack quantum computers, chips + cryostat + control electronics + software, ranging from 5 to ~100 physical qubits. Naturally, the buyers are mostly research institutions and univercities who need a real quantum computer to do research on quantum computation and simulation (to a lesser degree with the superconducting technology, though). (Often the research is done purely within clasically-simulated quantum computers, i.e. virtual QCs, but to verify and make the research publishable they need to run at least partial sub-problems on a real chip.) Another, smaller, market is HPC centers. They buy and install quantum computers into existing HPC infrastructure because a) they have a few customers who need it (sometimes those same research institutions/universities), and b) they need to solve the integration problem for the future when QCs are actually used for real-world problems and big customers come to HPCs to run both classical and quantum high-performance jobs. Here is an excerpt from my book I linked above, just to give a bit more context: --- Since quantum computers are essentially analog devices that allow you to control, in a limited fashion, a set of quantum objects, you can do some research in foundational quantum physics. [...] Still, given the current state of the industry, classical computers outperform most quantum systems. But the research applied to smaller QCs can be scaled once the hardware scales. Of course, the main area is quantum computing itself. From abstract, mathematical notions of algorithms to very low-level questions of calibration, many universities and research organizations are eager to have a quantum computer available to prove their theories and discover new properties. Commercial companies that deal with material science, battery technology, agriculture, and chemistry are buying quantum computers (or at least buying access to one) because they want to be ready if and when truly large-scale QCs become available. [...] And finally, integration research. This is the least known and least discussed topic in the industry but is very important. Its significance is one of the motivations for writing this book. Quantum computers, being research tools, are not normal products. They are driven by software, like anything else, but this software changes rapidly and is rarely written with long-term evolution in mind. If you buy a quantum computer today, chances are your code will not work on any other quantum computer, or even on the next iteration of the same machine. At the same time, researchers often need to work with multiple types of machines simultaneously, and HPC (high-performance computing) centers, i.e. supercomputing data centers, want to integrate quantum computers into their existing infrastructure and provide a "quantum compute" service to their users.
ju571nk3n 6mo ago
[flagged]
lkm0 6mo ago
To put this in context, we've had a streak of improvements to Shor's algorithm that have put the horizon much closer. In 2022, people from Microsoft estimated that it would take more than 10M (physical) qubits to implement factoring. We're now standing at a 1000x improvement. It's still years away for sure, but who can be unhappy with all that progress? ms paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.07629 https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.07629
- Strilanc 6mo ago
  Caution: that 10M estimate assumes gate error rates 10x lower than the ones assumed in the papers from TFA.
jb1991 6mo ago
This site is almost impossible to read on mobile unless you have good vision. Normally I can just hit the button in my phone browser to read it in reader mode, but this site doesn’t support that either. It’s a shame. I am surprised that in 2026 more websites don’t seem so concerned about responsive design, especially when the goal is to read the content.
- geoffbp 6mo ago
  Reading mode in your browser…?
  - cubefox 6mo ago
    > Normally I can just hit the button in my phone browser to read it in reader mode, but this site doesn’t support that either.
  - jb1991 6mo ago
    I would love to use reading mode in my browser if this site supported it. As I noted.
    - geoffbp 5mo ago
      If you request the desktop site, reading mode will be available (that’s my experience anyway).
- cubefox 6mo ago
  Yeah, I have the same issue (Firefox). Every website nowadays should have a responsive layout that works for smartphones.
- Jbird2k 6mo ago
  iPhone user here I have a button that I can adjust the text size on this site.
  - jb1991 6mo ago
s99850 6mo ago
[flagged]
Andebugulin 6mo ago
Feels a bit nice to live not only with the disturbance caused by unpredictability of AI, but by unpredictability of QC too, refreshing
DevCrate 6mo ago
[dead]
northlondoner 6mo ago
Note that. The primary mechanism in error-correction paper is "selective quantum observations". It means we don't need to use all available resource but selectively error-correct. Similar idea is also recently explored in quantum chaos, whereby system is still chaotic but localisation can be observed in the ancillary system. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22169v3 https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22169v3
- northlondoner 6mo ago
  Related phenomenon is quantum Zeno Effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Zeno_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Zeno_effect Zeno Effect appears over selective observation, rather than selective states.
Kate5477 6mo ago
[dead]

265 points by Strilanc 6mo ago

Sooo it’s essentially claiming that the impossible thing is essentially a bit less impossible, but currently still impossible. Nice

falcor84 6mo ago
The whole thing is that we have proofs that this is possible, and have been seeing continuous engineering progress. Having followed this for awhile, it seems to me that saying quantum computing is "still impossible" at this stage is like saying that GTA VI is still impossible, based on its unpredictable timelines.
- Overpower0416 6mo ago
  Sorry, I meant a quantum computer that is actually built where these theories can actually be applied. Current quantum computers are as useful as current nuclear fusion reactors. I am just over any sensational headlines from the past 10 years. They really need to drop a tweet like "Check out my quantum computer that is actually useful" like Sam Altman did with GPT to convince me.
  - Foobar8568 6mo ago
    At this stage, it's more like Musk and self driving cars, but at least QC around the corner is from mid 1990s
  - falcor84 6mo ago
    Well yes, but this is research - it progresses gradually and incrementally until eventually it is ready to be deployed. I for one am really interested in following these progress updates, rather than just being surprised when it finally drops. In particular, I find the recommendation to switch to quantum-resistant technology to be very important.

nebben64 5mo ago

I'm 6 days late but if anyone reads this: what does it mean we should "upgrade now to quantum-resistant cryptography" ? If I'm using RSA am I supposed to switch to something else?

ChrisArchitect 6mo ago

Related: Discussion on the Google one, Safeguarding cryptocurrency by disclosing quantum vulnerabilities responsibly https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47582418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47582418

tombert 6mo ago

Here's hoping that my stock for D-Wave ends up being worth something. Quantum computing seems super cool, but I've been a little skeptical of it actually ever yielding anything useful. I would love to be wrong, it seems neat, and I have read through a few books on the subject and played with simulators, so I'm not completely talking out of my ass here, but quantum as a whole has kind of felt like vaporware to me. As I said, I have stock in D-Wave, obviously it would be in my best interest for quantum to end up as cool as it seems.

esseph 6mo ago
You can rent Quantum computing time from IBM cloud today: https://www.ibm.com/quantum/products https://www.ibm.com/quantum/products https://quantum.cloud.ibm.com/docs/en/guides/plans-overview https://quantum.cloud.ibm.com/docs/en/guides/plans-overview I have NOT used it, but the idea is interesting.
- AlexCoventry 6mo ago
  You can rent it, but it's basically worthless at this stage.
  - pathOf_aFineMan 6mo ago
    there's still a long road to commercial applications but today's hardware is simulating quantum systems beyond the scale of classical methods, for example [1]; an interesting line of work opposite to this can be found in those who improve classical methods towards such examples [2], but these are only developed because of the existing quantum hardware Really though, today's IBM hardware is good fun to play with, eg for generating moderately large GHZ states [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26845 https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26845 [2]https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.14887 https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.14887
  - cbm-vic-20 6mo ago
    Is there anything you can do on a rented QC that you can't do cheaper on a simulated QC on a "classical" CPU/GPU today?

pmarreck 6mo ago

Can quantum computing do even basic math yet? I think this was the holdup. Or perhaps I'm missing the point.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
GeoSys 6mo ago
It doesn't do basic math ... just the hard one :)
bawolff 6mo ago
> I think this was the holdup It isn't...
georgeburdell 6mo ago
[flagged]
- qnleigh 6mo ago
  This comment is wildly inappropriate and violates the community guidelines here. I suggest you delete it.
qnleigh 6mo ago
This is a good question, and currently the answer is no. Quantum computers can only run very short, simple algorithms right now, because the qubits they're built out of are noisy. You need a lot of error correction, which the community is working on. The thing is, unlike ordinary computers, quantum computers can factor numbers about as easily as they can multiply them. So as soon as they can multiply two large integers, they'll also be able to factor the result and break RSA encryption based on keys of that size. This blog post gives a good sense of the state of the art and what progress might look like: Why haven't quantum computers factored 21 yet? https://algassert.com/post/2500 https://algassert.com/post/2500
- Foobar8568 6mo ago

amluto 6mo ago

One thing I find rather amazing about all of this is the degree to which the Bitcoin community has tried, for years, to claim that quantum computers will be another other than a complete break. Sure, it takes a pretty nice quantum computer or a pretty good algorithm or a degree of malice on the part of miners to break pay-to-script-hash if your wallet has the right properties, but that seems like a pretty weak excuse for the fact that the entire scheme is broken, completely, by QC. Does there even exist a credible post-quantum proof protocol that could be used to “rescue” P2SH wallets?

Strilanc 6mo ago
The best proposal I have heard for rescuing P2SH wallets after cryptographically relevant quantum computers exist is to require vulnerable wallets to precommit to transactions a day ahead of time. The precommitment doesn't reveal the public key. When the public key must be exposed as part of the actual transaction, an attacker cannot redirect the transaction for at least one day because they don't have a valid precommitment to point to yet.
- warkdarrior 6mo ago
  24-hour latency to make a payment? What is this, the 20th century?
  - Strilanc 6mo ago
    This is for rescue, not for payment. Once you've moved the coins to quantum-secure wallet, the delay would no longer be needed. ...probably some people would be very inconvenienced by this. But not as inconvenienced as having the coins stolen or declared forever inaccessible.
    - daveguy 6mo ago
      > ...probably some people would be very inconvenienced by this. But not as inconvenienced as having the coins stolen or declared forever inaccessible. I don't know why anyone f's around with crypto anymore. So many caveats, such a scammy ecosystem. It just doesn't seem worth the trouble to support a ransomware and money laundering tool.

socketcluster 6mo ago

Maybe it's a good time to start promoting my 5 year old, lightweight, hand-crafted, battle-tested, quantum-resistant blockchain: https://capitalisk.com/ https://capitalisk.com/ It's about 5000 lines of custom code. Crypto signature library written from scratch.

EdwardDiego 6mo ago
> Crypto signature library written from scratch. That's a sentence every white hat cryptography enthusiast loves to hear lol.
- socketcluster 6mo ago
  It's a very simple signature algorithm. They're welcome to try and crack it. If there is an issue with it, it shouldn't be hard to identify within those few hundred lines. Nobody found any issues in the last 5 years though. Isn't it a good thing that there exists at least one blockchain in the world which isn't based on the same crypto library used by every other project? What if those handful of libraries have a backdoor? What if the narrative that "you shouldn't roll out your own crypto" is a psyop to get every project to depend on the same library in order to backdoor them all at once at some future date? Strange how finance people always talk about hedging but in tech, nobody is hedging tech.
  - Nevermark 6mo ago
    > What's wrong with hedging? To be (an actual) hedge, something needs to be very solidly understood (by the purchaser), a very solid investment in its own right, and either reverse correlated or independently correlated specifically with a particular asset being hedged. And not based on analysis of one "hedging" scenario, because both are going to be owned over a huge distribution of scenarios. Probably the worst indicator of an investment being credible, is a promoter who has to stoop to the floor to ask "What's wrong with hedging?", as if that manipulative bon mot was ever in question, or was the relevant question. If a motivated promoter can only make a very bad case, believe them. And, if an "expert" attempts to get respect for their work from non-experts, instead of from other experts, there is something very wrong. Because the former makes no sense. -- If you don't know how to get respect from experts, study more, and figure out how to trash what you have. Counterintuitive. But if you have anything original right, thats how to find it. Identify it. Purify it. And be in a better position to build again, with just a little more leverage, and repeat. Or communicate it clearly to someone qualified to judge it. You won't have to persuade anyone. If you have to persuade someone, either you don't have something, or you don't understand what you have well enough to properly identify and communicate it. You have ambition. You have motivation. You have interest. You follow through and build. That is it. Don't stop. Ego derails ambition. Kill your darlings. Keep going.

GeoSys 6mo ago

So does BTC need to hard fork? Good luck getting to a consensus again ...

r4indeer 6mo ago
If QC gets to the point where breaking RSA and ECC in the real world is actually going to happen, I'd imagine you will find a consensus rather quickly.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
haakon 6mo ago
If an upgrade becomes necessary, it would be a soft fork. (Consensus would still be a challenge)
sMarsIntruder 6mo ago
I’m impressed by the BTC obsession: this will definitely impact the banking sector as a whole even before. Quantum FUD, here we come.
- tsimionescu 6mo ago
  The banking sector can relatively trivially move to a new encryption scheme - this is one of the huge advantages of centralized systems. Also, the banking sector, rather than trying to provide anonymity/pseudonimity, has KYC - they can relatively simply disable remote access if they think a current system is no longer secure, and get everyone to come in to a physical office and get a secure version, after manually verifying they are the rightful holder of the account. Tldr; Bitcoin relies entirely on encryption, banking does not. So broken encryption is a catastrophe for Bitcoin, but just a bad week for banking.
  - zahlman 6mo ago
    > they can relatively simply disable remote access if they think a current system is no longer secure, and get everyone to come in to a physical office After all these years of it not being required? I think that's... very naive with regard to how clients would respond.

freetonik 6mo ago

I worked at a quantum computing company that builds superconducting QC chips (so, not really applicable to one of the “bombshells” from the article). My team was designing the software stack which allows to control the QC, run quantum jobs/algorithms, and calibrate the parameters. I’ve made two attempts to explain the work we’ve been doing and to explain the current realistic state of the industry: 1. A talk at PyCon: https://youtu.be/tT1YLP5T71Y https://youtu.be/tT1YLP5T71Y 2. A free ebook “ Quantum Computing For Software Engineers” https://leanpub.com/quantum-computing-for-software-engineers https://leanpub.com/quantum-computing-for-software-engineers The company I left a few months ago is planning its IPO this year. Like almost all other quantum companies, it’s gonna be a SPAC merger, not a pure IPO. Those traded companies mentioned in the other comments are mostly SPACs as well.

sigmoid10 6mo ago
If they're going public I imagine they already sell some kind of QC chips. But, like, who buys them? Yesterday there was a new paper [1] that shows how Shor's algorithm could break realistic encryptions with as little as 10,000 qubits (instead of millions), but as far as I know quantum hardware is still orders of magnitude below even that target. So how big can the market actually be? Shipping to universities or other QC companies for playing around with some actual hardware is nice and all, but in the end someone will be left holding the bag. There is zero profit to be made at the end of the chain. [1] https://arxiv.org/html/2603.28627v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2603.28627v1
- freetonik 6mo ago
  During my 3.7 years at the company, we had dozens of sales of full-stack quantum computers, chips + cryostat + control electronics + software, ranging from 5 to ~100 physical qubits. Naturally, the buyers are mostly research institutions and univercities who need a real quantum computer to do research on quantum computation and simulation (to a lesser degree with the superconducting technology, though). (Often the research is done purely within clasically-simulated quantum computers, i.e. virtual QCs, but to verify and make the research publishable they need to run at least partial sub-problems on a real chip.) Another, smaller, market is HPC centers. They buy and install quantum computers into existing HPC infrastructure because a) they have a few customers who need it (sometimes those same research institutions/universities), and b) they need to solve the integration problem for the future when QCs are actually used for real-world problems and big customers come to HPCs to run both classical and quantum high-performance jobs. Here is an excerpt from my book I linked above, just to give a bit more context: --- Since quantum computers are essentially analog devices that allow you to control, in a limited fashion, a set of quantum objects, you can do some research in foundational quantum physics. [...] Still, given the current state of the industry, classical computers outperform most quantum systems. But the research applied to smaller QCs can be scaled once the hardware scales. Of course, the main area is quantum computing itself. From abstract, mathematical notions of algorithms to very low-level questions of calibration, many universities and research organizations are eager to have a quantum computer available to prove their theories and discover new properties. Commercial companies that deal with material science, battery technology, agriculture, and chemistry are buying quantum computers (or at least buying access to one) because they want to be ready if and when truly large-scale QCs become available. [...] And finally, integration research. This is the least known and least discussed topic in the industry but is very important. Its significance is one of the motivations for writing this book. Quantum computers, being research tools, are not normal products. They are driven by software, like anything else, but this software changes rapidly and is rarely written with long-term evolution in mind. If you buy a quantum computer today, chances are your code will not work on any other quantum computer, or even on the next iteration of the same machine. At the same time, researchers often need to work with multiple types of machines simultaneously, and HPC (high-performance computing) centers, i.e. supercomputing data centers, want to integrate quantum computers into their existing infrastructure and provide a "quantum compute" service to their users.

ju571nk3n 6mo ago

[flagged]

lkm0 6mo ago

To put this in context, we've had a streak of improvements to Shor's algorithm that have put the horizon much closer. In 2022, people from Microsoft estimated that it would take more than 10M (physical) qubits to implement factoring. We're now standing at a 1000x improvement. It's still years away for sure, but who can be unhappy with all that progress? ms paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.07629 https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.07629

Strilanc 6mo ago
Caution: that 10M estimate assumes gate error rates 10x lower than the ones assumed in the papers from TFA.

jb1991 6mo ago

This site is almost impossible to read on mobile unless you have good vision. Normally I can just hit the button in my phone browser to read it in reader mode, but this site doesn’t support that either. It’s a shame. I am surprised that in 2026 more websites don’t seem so concerned about responsive design, especially when the goal is to read the content.

geoffbp 6mo ago
Reading mode in your browser…?
- cubefox 6mo ago
  > Normally I can just hit the button in my phone browser to read it in reader mode, but this site doesn’t support that either.
- jb1991 6mo ago
  I would love to use reading mode in my browser if this site supported it. As I noted.
  - geoffbp 5mo ago
    If you request the desktop site, reading mode will be available (that’s my experience anyway).
cubefox 6mo ago
Yeah, I have the same issue (Firefox). Every website nowadays should have a responsive layout that works for smartphones.
Jbird2k 6mo ago
iPhone user here I have a button that I can adjust the text size on this site.
- jb1991 6mo ago

s99850 6mo ago

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Andebugulin 6mo ago

Feels a bit nice to live not only with the disturbance caused by unpredictability of AI, but by unpredictability of QC too, refreshing

DevCrate 6mo ago

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northlondoner 6mo ago

Note that. The primary mechanism in error-correction paper is "selective quantum observations". It means we don't need to use all available resource but selectively error-correct. Similar idea is also recently explored in quantum chaos, whereby system is still chaotic but localisation can be observed in the ancillary system. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22169v3 https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22169v3

northlondoner 6mo ago
Related phenomenon is quantum Zeno Effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Zeno_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Zeno_effect Zeno Effect appears over selective observation, rather than selective states.

Kate5477 6mo ago

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