We're on our way to "Bug 2030" (in the style of Y2K) and almost nobody is talking about it!
Machine translation from the original post. Not reviewed by a human translator. Historical claims may no longer be current.
We're on our way to "Bug 2030" (in the style of Y2K) and almost nobody is talking about it!
In 2000 there was hysteria around "Y2K". Everyone thought that computers that hadn't been updated to support dates after 1999 would reset from 99 to 00 and cause widespread failures around the world.
In the end practically nothing happened, partly because a lot was invested in advance to fix it.
Thirty years later we are approaching the edge of a new cliff again, and this time the risk is more real.
Encryption and quantum computing.
Everything we trust today, your passwords, your email, banking, the crypto world, every transaction on the network, every secure connection, relies on public-key encryption, mainly RSA. The security of the method is based on one simple assumption. To crack such a key, a regular computer needs to factor a huge number into prime factors, and that takes it time measured in years and centuries.
As long as that's true, the network is safe.
Quantum computing breaks this assumption. Instead of trying one possibility after another in series, it performs calculations in parallel, and with an algorithm called Shor it is able to factor that same number in reasonable time. So the moment there is a large enough quantum computer, the encryption that holds up the whole network will simply collapse!
How realistic is it?
Here is what changed in just the past year: in 2019 it was estimated that breaking a 2048-bit RSA key takes about twenty million qubits. Work published in 2025, among others by Google, brought the number down to under a million. The biggest quantum computer that exists today holds about 1180 qubits, so we are still quite far.
But AI also lived alongside us for a decade and was reserved only for geniuses at the university who dealt with machine learning until.. one day ChatGPT went live and since then it's all history.
The gap is closing much faster than they thought, and IBM, Google and Microsoft are in the race, and in Israel too there is lively activity between the Weizmann Institute and the Technion and companies like Quantum Source and Qedma.
Just this week Qedma published a breakthrough in the way they operate a quantum computer and show results
consistent in calculations. In simple words - we are quickly approaching industrial quantum computers, ones that can be used for calculations, and as a result also for breaking encryption.
In my view there are two scenarios:
One - we talk about it early enough, switch to new encryption protocols that already exist and have been standardized, and it ends quietly just like Y2K.
The second - we don't make it in time, it happens faster than expected, and arrives like a "black swan" with a systemic collapse in the style of 2008 (remember the stock market crash in the 2000s and then in 2008?).
And there is a third thing that is already happening now, regardless of the two scenarios. Someone is currently collecting all of our encrypted traffic and storing it aside, in order to decrypt it on the day they have a quantum computer. In the industry this is called harvest now decrypt later. What is sent encrypted today won't necessarily stay secret tomorrow.
I hope I won't have to come back to this post in the coming years and say "I knew it", but to know that like me many others know it and are preparing for it and that the race to protect ourselves will win the race to break into ourselves.