When will Q-Day actually happen? Taking bets, winner gets a custom title

Started by Xavi, Yesterday at 06:53 PM

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Topic: When will Q-Day actually happen? Taking bets, winner gets a custom title   Views(Read 28 times)
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Xavi(1) BigDog_Fan(1)

Xavi

Q-Day is the informal name the security and crypto community has landed on for the day a genuinely capable quantum computer becomes able to break the encryption protecting most of the internet, mainly by running Shor's algorithm against the elliptic curve and RSA cryptography that everything from banking to email currently relies on. Nobody actually knows when it happens, but plenty of serious institutions have taken a real swing at estimating it.

For reference on what the actual experts are saying, the Citi Institute has put the odds of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer existing at roughly 19 to 34 percent by 2034, climbing to 60 to 82 percent by 2044. Google has separately floated 2029 as an internal target for migrating its own systems away from vulnerable cryptography, and the US CNSSP-15 policy requires new national security systems to support post quantum algorithms starting in 2027, with full implementation targeted by 2035.

So here's the game, everyone posts their own genuine best guess for the actual date Q-Day happens, meaning the first credible, publicly confirmed instance of a quantum computer breaking real world encryption at practical key sizes. Post an actual specific date, not just a year, and feel free to explain your reasoning if you want to make a real case for it.

On format, dates rather than unix timestamps please, keeps this readable for everyone rather than turning into a wall of raw numbers, though if you want to throw a unix timestamp in parentheses afterward purely for fun, nobody's stopping you. Might be worth checking back on this thread periodically either way
Closest guess to the actual confirmed date wins a custom title on this board, and given how far out some of these guesses are probably going to be, this might end up being the longest running bet this forum has ever hosted

BigDog_Fan

March 14 2031, mostly because it's Pi Day and I like the idea of that specific irony if it actually lands anywhere close

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