"In a five- to 10-year timeframe, quantum computing will break encryption as we know it."
Since its conceptual birth in the early 1980s, quantum computing has held promise for systems that could exponentially outperform today's computers.
Rather than leaning on the zeroes and ones of classical computers, quantum computers emerged from quantum physics, which is the study of the fundamental building blocks of matter and energy.
Those strange properties account for the technology's potentially explosive abilities; each additional qubit doubles a quantum computer's power.
They are named D-Wave Systems , Rigetti Computing, IonQ , and Quantum Computing.