I believe we’re really looking at less than 10yrs given the speed of evolution of QC to date. Instead of two new QC discoveries each year to advance QC; we’re now seeing 2 new discoveries every 2 months now not to mention China and US advancements on networking and communications and scalable QC for devices which Google plans to release their QC device in 2017.
Quantum computers could bring about a quantum leap in processing power, with countless benefits for fields like data science and AI. But there’s also a dark side: this extra power will make it simple to crack the encryption keeping everything from our emails to our online banking secure.
A recent report from the Global Risk Institute predicted that there is a one in seven chance vital cryptography tools will be rendered useless by 2026, rising to a 50% chance by 2031. In the meantime, hackers and spies can hoover up data encrypted using current approaches and simply wait until quantum computers powerful enough to crack the code have been developed.