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Comment by bobsmooth | Hacker News Reader

Don't get me wrong, it's good to be prepared, but what are the chances we'll need these algorithms by 2050?

Basically zero.

Great talk by Peter Gutman why this whole quantum topic is bollocks: https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/bollocks.pdf

hn thread about this (with some interesting comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43046631

There are many secrets created 25 years ago that need to be secure now; think of national security secrets.

US is pushing for these to replace classic crypto in commercial applications by 2030.

The C in CNSA 2.0 is for "Commercial".

Predicting anything 25 years out is a fool's errand.

Cryptographically relavent Quantum computers are definitely not happening in the near term, but 25 years is a long enough time horizon that it is plausible.

Just consider what tech was like 25 years ago. Would anyone (without the benefit of hindsight) in 1999 really be able to predict modern AI, the ubiquity of smart phones, etc. Heck 25 years ago people still thought the internet thing was a fad. Anyone trying to predict 25 years out is full of crap.

https://xkcd.com/678/

Except for RC4, which people were side-eyeing on Usenet in the 1990s, and key size progress, I think the cryptography primitives we were using 25 years ago have held up reasonably well. A lot of things that have been major issues since then are things that we know theoretically back in 2000, but just didn't know viscerally, because people hadn't written exploits. That's not the same thing as, like, Peter Schwabe's take on whether a particular key exchange or KEM is likely to survive until 2050.

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