[frik]

Wake me up when it's ready. For two decades we hear announcements that Quantum Computers are almost ready.

Yet beside bluffs and prototypes that require superconductor with very cold -230° C to do little, none of them resurfaced later.

Quantum Computers can be exiting and devastating. What happens if the first company/state keeps it a trade secrete and uses Quantum Computers without telling the rest of the world? (what if...) With Quantum Computers all the "secure digital stuff" of today can be broken, say good bye to your cloud online security. A good/bad actor can read everything. We should think about how to mitigate this issue, isn't it?

[nradov]

Plenty of people have been thinking about it for years and developing encryption algorithms which should remain secure even if someone manages to build a working quantum computer.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography

[frik]

Good link. Nevertheless HTTPS/HTTP2/TLS/bcrypt/MD5/SHA-256/AES/etc need an upgrade/replacement to be ready for day X, so the internet isn't really prepared yet. Also mind all the previously already leaked encrypted data got harvested by bad actors and is waiting in archives to be easily readable on day Y.

[wbl]

There is a plan. There already are postquantum encryption schemes (and drafts to use them), and we can wait with signatures for a while. NIST will be making recommendations soon.