[s1dev]

It is worth noting that all known classical algorithms to solve this problem scale exponentially with the problem size, and fundamentally there is no reason why putting 60 or 70 qubits in the fridge is particularly more difficult than 53. The point is that while classical algorithm advances can take off orders of magnitude off the runtime, this has to be done _every_ time there is a small increase in the size of the quantum computing device in order to kill a supremacy claim.

(To clarify, I personally think optimization is not a remotely near-term application)

[civilized]

You're assuming that quantum algorithms scale better than classical ones. To the best of my knowledge (which is not much), the cases in which this is known to be true are extremely limited. We have a faster algorithm for factoring numbers, Shor's algorithm, and I'm not sure there's anything of note beyond that.