>>14292306Took a class on quantum computing in undergrad. The current state of the art is only useful for very specific problems, sort of like GPUs or ASICs.
The biggest commercial application I know of is something called a "database oracle," which would make querying large datasets very fast. This will only be relevant to big tech, since fast queries on small datasets (i.e. less than 500 million rows) are already easy to do if you understand your database.
The biggest criminal/government application is defeating public-key cryptography. A lot of internet traffic is protected by factoring problems (RSA, ElGamal, Diffie-Hellman), which can be solved quickly using Shor's algorithm. This attack will be relevant until the NIST standardizes post-quantum public key crypto and the major players in computing adopt it. It also has the potential to completely break a lot of cryptocurrencies, since the key to your crypto wallet uses public key.
t. infosec grad student
