Alice & Bob says RSA-2048 falls in 3.14 days with 23,000 cat qubits
jedisct1 · x · 2026-10-30
Quantum computing startup Alice & Bob published a new resource estimate for running Shor's algorithm on its cat-qubit architecture: about 22,593 physical qubits and roughly 3.14 days to factor RSA-2048, which the company claims is the smallest published footprint at that runtime — about 40x fewer physical qubits than Google Quantum AI's 2025 estimate by Craig Gidney. The trajectory has shrunk fast: best estimates were 20M qubits in 2019, just under 100k in 2024. The post argues the error-correction requirements mirror those needed for useful chemistry and materials applications, and warns Bitcoin and most blockchains rely on similarly breakable elliptic-curve cryptography. An accompanying chart compares architectures across size and runtime trade-offs.
- Benchmark: factoring RSA-2048, the field's standard test since 1994
- Key claim: record-low total quantum resources at multi-day runtime
- Implication: post-quantum migration urgency for banking, software updates, and blockchains
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