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Comment by freemint | Hacker News Reader

Even when facing specialized quantum circuits classical supercomputers are still more cost effective.

Quantum computers can't solve any problems of sizes that occur in industry. There are huge problems with scaling up quantum computers and there are some reasons to doubt that we will ever be able to scale it up as much to break crypto or solve industrial problems.

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How cost effective were microprocessors in the 60s?

Than you. Somebody speaks with some common sense. All major breakthroughs start small and are not cost effectvie immediately. People should be way more enthused that this is possible rather than talking about all the negatives.

I don't think it's true that all major breakthroughs start small, but more importantly, you have no basis for assuming this is a major breakthrough. The issues stated here are not just cost problems of scaling up, but theoretical problems of what this technology can accomplish.

They might have stayed cost prohibitive for a lot longer if it weren't for the Apollo program buying up everything they could get

They became cost effective in a few years. The average price per integrated circuit dropped from $50 in 1962 to $2 in 1967. By then Moore's Law was established. At the end of the decade we had hundreds of transistors on a chip. At the early 70s we already had general-purpose microprocessors with thousands of transistors.

Quantum computing is being researched since the 1980s without a theoretical understanding whether they can be built at a practical scale.

As pointed out by others, they were very cost effective. And they replaced vacuum tubes, which were fragile. But, the most important thing is that they immediately solved a problem (ballistic trajectory calculations in missiles) and therefore had an industrial use which led to a virtuous cycle of improvement.

Quantum computers aren't useful; they're still searching for a use.

I think that NSA and similar organizations would be interested in breaking encryption algorithms. Imagine some old archive encrypted by RSA which contains useful data.

Also that means that encrypting anything valuable with quantum-unresistant algorithm and storing it in an unsafe place is not wise even today.

We can assume that NSA maintains a hardware portfolio and that quantum computers would be a tiny part of that. I'm sure NSA has been able to decrypt RSA for a while. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-nsa-rsa/excl... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullrun_(decryption_program) and https://www.pcworld.com/article/2064960/google-strengthens-i...

The history of decryption hardware is fascinating and filled with practical solutions, which QC is not.

The two aren't really related. It's a bit like saying "we were able to build computers, surely we can also build <insert arbitrary tech thing>". Still waiting for that high-temperature superconductor.

As far as I understand it, the biggest problem is getting the manufacturing precision good enough. The more you scale, the more precise the manufacturing needs to be, which was never really a problem with microprocessors.

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