Never say never...
Right now they are using laser beams to hold the qbit atoms. Set up a chipful of laser LEDs and the proper cryogenic equipment, and you have your qbit jig. Not everything has to be hand-fabricated.
Japan will probably have kilo-qbits before we do.
I never said never.
Just implied not right now.
They’ve got 5 to “crack” a 4-bit key, we’d need thousands (go research the relevant crypto discussions via Google) to crack 256-bit encryption in a sane amount of time.
As a kid, Dad kept a 32-bit core memory board in a drawer. It was pretty neat at the time.
Right now, I’m writing this on a computer that stores 4,096,000,000,000,000 bits in the same space & price.
I expect a similar increase in qbit availability & density in no longer than the same time frame, if not a whole lot sooner.
The biggest problem we’ll face with computing technology 40 years hence is figuring out what to _do_ with all that mind-boggling capacity. We’re just coming to grips with the possibility that we might actually crack large-key encryption in a matter of _minutes_; what else could be done with an order of magnitude of orders of magnitude more qbits? I remember looking at a Cray 2 (in person) and wondering what could happen if we threw all that power at a user interface; today, I’ve got that in my pocket and colloquially call it a “phone”.
Get yer shades. The future is gonna be bright.