[Cryptography] Some quantum computers might need more power than supercomputers

[Christian Huitema]

On 1/10/2026 8:47 PM, Peter Gutmann via cryptography wrote:

> So I think step 0 of SNDL (again from the talk) would be to figure out who, if
> anyone, would actually be affected by this, and if it's that important why the
> attacker would pin their hopes on a physics experiment 30 years in the future
> rather than just infiltrating the target's systems and grabbing the plaintext.

Who is getting the contract to build the large data centers that will 
"store now"? I am sure these folks don't care whether the "physics 
experiment 30 years in the future" will succeed and whether "decrypt 
later" actually happens. What they do care is that politicians are 
convinced that this is a good bet, and sign the bottom line of the 
multi-billion "cost + 25%" contract for that new data center...

-- Christian Huitema