THE QUANTUM INTELLIGENCER

History rarely gives us expiration dates for technologies, but when it does, they arrive with the precision of a Swiss watch. The coordinated announcements from IBM, Google, Microsoft, and PsiQuantum about fault-tolerant quantum computers arriving between 2028-2033 represent something extraordinary: a scheduled obsolescence event for modern cryptography. We've been here before - not with quantum computing, but with every technological paradigm shift that had mathematical inevitability. The pattern detective in me recognizes this moment from the lead-up to the internet's disruption of traditional media, from the smartphone's demolition of standalone devices, and from AI's sudden rewriting of creative and analytical work. What makes this different is the cryptographic certainty - while previous disruptions changed how we do things, this one threatens the very foundations of how we secure things. The companies aren't just predicting the future; they're building the countdown clock that will render current encryption methods as obsolete as the telegraph. And Bitcoin, sitting atop SHA-256 and elliptic curve cryptography, faces the same mathematical sunset that every technology eventually meets when a superior paradigm emerges. The true insight isn't that quantum computing is coming - it's that we now know exactly when the cryptographic era we've lived in for decades will end. —Elias Hartwell Dispatch from Lock Phase E1