@dalias

I don't know if that's strictly true. The earliest and most persistent voices on quantum computing and PQC have been NSA and NIST, who are not generally regarded as suckers for hype trains and grifters.

Do I trust either of them completely? Absolutely not, especially after the Dual_EC_DRBG debacle and other major scandals.

Do I think that practical quantum computing is an eminent threat or emerging major advance in technology? My current sense is "probably not" but not "definitely not."

But I don't think it's fair to say that all of the voices urging us to take this potentially disruptive tech seriously are of the same cloth as the AGI and cryptocurrency con men.

Don't get me wrong here. It's not in my top 10 or even top 100 list of priorities given <waves arms around> everything else going on. I'm not going to invest much of my time, money, or energy into it. I'll adopt PQC as others do, but I'm not sprinting for the exits on conventional crypto, and won't be hanging breathlessly on every word from the tech press on the subject.

@dalias

I get that it's possible that NSA is pushing PQC with an ulterior motive. But NIST was pretty pissed off about misled by NSA's con job during the Dual_EC_DRBG fallout, and there are a lot of eyes on the PQC algorithms. So my personal sense is that it is very unlikely that PQC is a backdoor.

@dalias

Oh, to have the luxury of confidently viewing everything in life in absolute terms with no possibility of being mistaken...

@DaveMWilburn Look, it has been well established for decades that you do not rely on newly-introduced cryptography that has not stood the test of time successfully protecting things of high value.

I don't see how you can interpret folks just throwing that principle out the window and saying "here let's all trust this new thing!" as anything but foolishness or malice.

This is not absolutism or overconfidence in my opinion. It's a fundamental principle of how *not* to be overconfident when the stakes are high.