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Comment by jnwatson | Hacker News Reader

Breaking RSA and ECC is commercially relevant.

Not in the long term, because as soon as quantum computers can practically break RSA, it would cease to be used and thus breaking RSA would become commercially irrelevant.

Currently the choice of replacements is taking its time e.g. https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2022/07/nist-announces... but if tonight we'd find out that people do have sufficiently powerful quantum computers, we'd just start using one of the candidates in a jiffy)

If you can break RSA once using say a $34 billion machine that is a one-shot operation, is it really commercially relevant?

With the number of qubits required to break RSA, there's no reason why general purpose computing wouldn't be possible.

Without assuming a spherical cow, that is well into the realm of science fiction-stuff we have no idea how to do. It assumes a degree of control over the variables that is far beyond anything we have access to.

As a parallel, on a purely theoretical level, we know how to construct a warp drive as well[1].

Solving a theoretical equation is one thing, replicating the prerequisite conditions experimentally is another entirely. Theoretically you can balance a perfect sphere upon another perfect sphere. In practice, you can't because setting up such an arrangement is practically impossible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

> Breaking RSA and ECC is commercially relevant.

Yes, but we don't actually know that we can build such a device.

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