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Q-Day Gets Nearer?

2 min readMar 8, 2026

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The quantum bar for breaking our existing public key cryptography has possibly just been lowered significantly with a paper outlining a method of using QLDPC (Quantum Low-Density Parity Check) codes, to break RSA-2048 in less than fewer than 100,000 physical qubits [here]:

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This is a considerable reduction in the hardware that requires to break RSA-2048. With QLDPC, the logical qubits use an improved coding method and “Clifford Frame Cleaning” for parallelism. Before this paper, Craig Gidney — at Google Quantum AI — had defined that it would need less than one million, and would take one week to crack [here]:

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At the current time, a team at Caltech has managed to create a quantum computer with 6,100 qubits using neutral atoms, and those advancements seem to fit in with Moore’s Law. Previously, estimates for the number of qubits doubling every nine months would put 100,000 qubits as achievable by around 2031, but a more likely estimate would put it around 2035:

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Prof Bill Buchanan OBE FRSE
Prof Bill Buchanan OBE FRSE

Written by Prof Bill Buchanan OBE FRSE

Professor of Cryptography. Serial innovator. Believer in fairness, justice & freedom. Based in Edinburgh. Old World Breaker. New World Creator. Building trust.