Exactly. It's not like Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn et al could foresee what they were facilitating for when they built the Internet. Bring on quantum computing, and lets see what awesome stuff the rest of us can build on top of it
VPN, email, AES... really everything on the internet. While it is amazing and revolutionary, concern and awe are not mutually exclusive.
Kinda weird you wouldn't be concerned that within 10-15 years all internet banking as it exists today will be compromised.
I'd be less concerned about my VPN and more concerned about how reliant our financial and military systems are on public key cryptography.
I'm pretty sure once quantum computing takes off engineers will be able to safely port an already existing encryption protocol onto it, it is not a major concern to me.
The point being made is that public-key encryption techniques assume that it is difficult to factor large numbers. Even with modern computers, this takes a very long time. But this wouldn't be true with quantum computers.
The most popular and well-studied public-key encryption systems use factoring, but there are lots of other proposed schemes. The ability to quickly factor products of large primes would cause a temporary upset while alternative systems are brought in as replacements.
Its not quite as easy as just swapping out schemes. As I understand it a practical quantum computer would break all proposed public key encryption methods except those based on lattice problems. Lattice based cryptography is still in the preliminary stages of research and is at the moment extremely slow compared to the currently popular encryption methods.