[Yoric]

I've seen a recent paper that claims that they have successfully executed one (single) instance of Grover's algorithm using existing commercial quantum hardware, with lots of hypotheses and lots of manual intervention.

We'll get there, but I don't think that anybody has reasonably/reproducibly broken RSA using a quantum computer just yet.

[asdff]

When you think of the significance of being able to break encryption like this, it stands to reason that tech that achieves these capabilities would be born secret.

[Yoric]

I'm not sure.

Quantum computing is based on a series of scientific breakthroughs and still needs quite a few scientific and technological breakthroughs in several domains before it becomes viable for cryptography (in other fields, we're much closer), in addition to lots of custom hardware.

It's extremely rare (and unpredictable) for a scientist to achieve any kind of breakthrough entirely on their own. They need to exchange ideas with other scientists from all over the world. So you pretty much need your scientists are to do their research largely in public – it _might_ be possible to emulate this if you have a large enough number of scientists on some kind of secret campus, but you'll need to make sure that you're hiring top scientists and you're hurting their ability to both learn and teach the future top scientists you're also going to need and their disappearance from the public track will attract lots of attention.

Add to this the custom hardware, which will quite often come from another country, and it's really hard to keep the big things secret.

[asdff]

The military is pretty good at coordinating complex engineering projects in secret.

[spacecadet]

Secrets are near impossible to keep beyond 1 person.

[asdff]

Sure, plus at that point they don't have utility. But still, the government has a track record of secret keeping and silencing entire organizations.