The truth is that most of the noise around quantum computing as an imminent threat to Bitcoin is driven by narrative rather than by verifiable capability. The comparison to Moore’s law is misplaced because Neven’s law is not grounded in recorded empirical observation. Without observable breakthroughs in factoring numbers meaningfully larger than 15 these projections remain speculative at best.
The distinction between physical and logical qubits is central here. Marketing materials and funding pitches lean heavily on rising physical qubit counts because it is an easy metric to showcase. The logical qubits that actually matter for applications like breaking elliptic curve cryptography are nowhere near the required scale. Worse yet the exponential scaling of error rates could prove catastrophic for large scale factoring rendering much of the current optimism irrelevant.
The truth is that most of the noise around quantum computing as an imminent threat to Bitcoin is driven by narrative rather than by verifiable capability. The comparison to Moore’s law is misplaced because Neven’s law is not grounded in recorded empirical observation. Without observable breakthroughs in factoring numbers meaningfully larger than 15 these projections remain speculative at best.
The distinction between physical and logical qubits is central here. Marketing materials and funding pitches lean heavily on rising physical qubit counts because it is an easy metric to showcase. The logical qubits that actually matter for applications like breaking elliptic curve cryptography are nowhere near the required scale. Worse yet the exponential scaling of error rates could prove catastrophic for large scale factoring rendering much of the current optimism irrelevant.