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by some_furry 1100 days ago
Subtext: This is about quantum computers, which have been known to break RSA and ECC for the order of 30-ish years now.
2 comments

*known to be able to

No quantum computer has ever been used for that purpose in real life, however.

Kind of goes without saying when nobody has built a quantum computer of the type we are talking about. No general purpose error corrected quantum computer has been used to do anything because they don't exist yet.
I don't think that's common knowledge. It's commonly accepted truth in the industry, but particularly when most people think of military/spies as secretly X years ahead (pick a number) of what the public knows is possible, the tech sector in general can't be expected to know this. It's good to add this in a thread with a headline that sounds like anyone using ecc keys might have a big problem.
>No general purpose error corrected quantum computer has been used to do anything because they don't exist yet.

It isn't cryptographically relevant yet, but quantum supremacy was achieved in 2020: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.01625

That particular demonstration is interesting, but it's not a general-purpose error-corrected quantum computer. It's a single-purpose quantum computer that simulates a quantum process with fewer gate operations than a classical computer needs to simulate the same process.
FYI there is no such thing as a general purpose quantum computer. All quantum computes are special purpose.
That's not true. There is such a thing as a completely general set of quantum gates, which combined with qubit memory, would make for a general quantum computer capable of computing any unitary transformation to a certain accuracy.
I don't think that machine was either general-purpose or error-corrected though. IIUC we can build at most a few error-corrected gates right now.
You mean "theoretically known"