Justin Drake

SECP256K1, the 256 stands for 256 bit.

So you take this number and then you multiply it by five or six or something.

And that will give you roughly the number of logical qubits that you need.

So let's call it 1,500.

And so, because today we're at one logical qubit, in some sense, we're three orders of magnitude away, like three 10Xs in order to get there.

But again, what will happen is that we're going to have improvements at the error correction side of things.

Right now, the 1,000 to 1 will become maybe 100 to 1 or 10 to 1.

And also, we're going to have improvements on the algorithmic side of things that will reduce the number of physical qubits, sorry, logical qubits.

Now, on the runtimes, this is kind of interesting because there's two flavors of quantum computers.

There's the so-called fast clock and the slow clock.

So the fast clock operate really fast, kind of at the speed of light.

So you have the so-called superconducting quantum computers, and you have the photonic quantum computers.

And photonic, as the name suggests, it's using photons, light, which explains why it's like so fast.

And then you have the other flavor, which is the slow clock.

They're called trapped ions and neutral atoms.

The names don't really matter, but roughly speaking, they operate a thousand times slower.

And each architecture and so-called modality has its own advantages and disadvantages.

And so it's quite possible that in the beginning, we might see a slow clock modality win out.

in the sense that they will be the first one to break a key, but it will take them a long time.

It might take them a week or a month.