THE QUANTUM INTELLIGENCER

LONDON, 21 AUGUST — LONDON, 21 AUGUST — The cryptographic protections that underpin the digital age now carry a migration timetable measured in years rather than decades. The United States has directed federal agencies to complete the transition to post-quantum encryption by December 2030; Google has moved its own deadline to 2029, citing 'significant progress on quantum computing hardware development' (Information Age, 2026). Australia's Signals Directorate counsels completion by the end of 2030 (ASD, 2026). None of this requires a functioning quantum machine, for the practice of harvesting encrypted traffic against a future decryption capability is already underway, and the data so gathered does not age. The threat, in short, has ceased to be a forecast and become a schedule. These dates form a ledger, and ledgers repay attention. The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology has set 2030 as the year it will begin deprecating the vulnerable algorithms and 2035 as the year of full removal (B2B News, 2026). Google has brought its own migration deadline to 2029 (Information Age, 2026). The American federal government has directed agencies to complete the transition by December 2030; Australia's Signals Directorate recommends the same terminal date, while the Protective Security Policy Framework requires entities to have a transition plan in place by July 2027 (Information Age, 2026; ASD, 2026). The Global Risk Institute's Quantum Threat Timeline Report, published in March with the judgment of 26 experts, called a cryptographically relevant quantum computer 'quite possible' within ten years and 'likely' within fifteen (CPG, 2026). NIST's Dustin Moody observes that cryptographic migrations habitually take ten to twenty years (CPG, 2026), which makes the arithmetic of the calendar the central fact of the transition. Hardware milestones accumulate on their own schedule. In January 2025 Google's 105-qubit Willow chip demonstrated steep error reduction and a benchmark beyond classical supercomputers (Decrypt, 2026). In February Microsoft announced its Majorana 1 platform and reported record logical-qubit entanglement with Atom Computing (Decrypt, 2026). In April NIST laboratories extended superconducting qubit coherence to 0.6 milliseconds (Decrypt, 2026). In September Caltech unveiled a neutral-atom machine operating 6,100 qubits at 99.98 percent accuracy (Decrypt, 2026). In October IBM entangled 120 qubits and Google confirmed a verified quantum speed-up; in November IBM announced chips and software aimed at quantum advantage in 2026 and fault-tolerant systems by 2029, having earlier set targets of 200 logical qubits by 2029 and more than 1,000 in the early 2030s (Decrypt, 2026). For scale, the largest publicly acknowledged processors operating in 2026 hold roughly 1,180 noisy qubits, while breaking RSA-2048 is estimated to require under a million stable, error-corrected qubits (B2B News, 2026). Google Quantum AI research this year reduced its estimated requirement dramatically from a 2019 figure of twenty million (B2B News, 2026), and a separate March study reported a reduction of about twenty times in the physical qubits needed to attack elliptic-curve cryptography (CPG, 2026). Policy followed. Coinbase established an independent advisory board on quantum computing and blockchain security in January 2026; in March two research papers, from Caltech and Google, suggested that elliptic-curve cryptography might be broken with fewer qubits and fewer computational steps than previously expected, and Google formalised its 2029 readiness target (Decrypt, 2026). In April an Italian researcher, Giancarlo Lelli, used a publicly available quantum computer to crack a simplified elliptic-curve key; in May the United States Department of Commerce committed two billion dollars to quantum development; in June France said it would cease certifying technologies not considered quantum-safe, and the American President signed two executive orders, one expanding quantum computing capability and one speeding the transition to quantum-resistant encryption (Decrypt, 2026). Japan's Financial Services Agency had already stated in April 2025 that given the resources required, it was inappropriate to delay preparation and that immediate action was necessary (The AI Journal, 2026). Blockchains supply their own figures. Estimates of exposed Bitcoin wallets range from $452 billion (Decrypt, 2026) to more than $711 billion (sofokleous10.gr, 2026), with the divergence reflecting different definitions of exposed address. About one million Satoshi-era bitcoin carry public keys visible before any spend, and abandoned coins, roughly $180 billion, include an estimated $100 billion believed to belong to Satoshi (Decrypt, 2026). A recent engineering note from Circle estimates that migrating all Bitcoin unspent transaction outputs to post-quantum wallets would take 76 days of uninterrupted processing (Circle, 2026). The same note observes that active addresses that have previously signed must migrate before the threshold because their public keys have been exposed, whereas passive Ed25519 addresses may be recoverable after the fact by proving knowledge of the seed (Circle, 2026). These numbers will be read by archivists as the opening entries of a longer account. The transition from wax to wafers, from paper ledgers to double-entry, each had its own chronology and its own period of confusion. What distinguishes this one is that the vulnerable inventory is known before the new instruments are universally available. The ledger remains open; entries are still being made. —Dr. Octavia Blythe Dispatch from The Institutional E1