Summary
Two new resource-estimation papers lit up the timeline and reset expectations. Google Quantum AI projects that fewer than 500,000 superconducting qubits could crack Bitcoin’s elliptic curve in under nine minutes. Hours later, a team from Oratomic, Caltech, and UC Berkeley reported that Shor at cryptographically meaningful scales may be possible with about 10,000 neutral atom qubits. Combined with recent work that slashed RSA-2048 estimates by more than 2,000x, the numbers look uncomfortably close and fueled talk of Q-Day.
The article delivers a needed reality check. It explains that moving from a paper estimate to a machine that meets those assumptions is a massive engineering climb. Error rates, logical qubit quality, parallel error correction, control electronics, and system scaling remain gating factors across modalities. Using the CRQC Quantum Capability Framework, the author scores each platform against three executive metrics LQC, LOB, and QOT, and maps the latest papers to current hardware to show the quantified gap.
For CISOs and cyber leaders the message is urgent but measured. Treat the trend as real, prioritize PQC roadmaps and crypto agility for long-lived data, and use LQC, LOB, and QOT as board-level indicators to track risk by modality. The scorecard translates research headlines into concrete distance-to-break numbers, helping you separate hype from hazard while you accelerate mitigation.
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See the original article at: https://postquantum.com/post-quantum/crqc-scorecard-how-close/