This conveniently leaves out three key facts.
1) Breakthroughs in math are just as dangerous as breakthroughs in hardware. We don't know the algorithms we don't know. Shor's is a very new discovery in math, a baby. It was there all along, we had no idea. Can we optimize it, reducing the number of logical qubits needed by a large degree? Likely we can. We can also use AI to devise the classical algos to weed down the input to Short's without even needing to optimizing Shot's itself, for considerable gain. Likely we'll do both at once. We also don't know if there are other quantum algorithms out there that enable more efficient factoring methods, as the space of quantum algorithms is woefully unexplored, and it's entirely possible there could be a paper published tomorrow that changes everything. (We don't even know if qubits themselves are the way to go or if there is something exponentially better.) Basically there's a lot we just don't know in the math side here.
2) The majority of research on the hardware side is military/weapons research, advances in which we will not hear about. China in potentially investing 5 to 10 times as much in quantum research as all known US private-sector investment combined. But it's mostly all very quiet.
3) We have no idea the impact of upcoming AI discoveries on error correction using messy qubits. AI solved protein folding, and that was years ago. We can make messy qubits at scale with the current hardware, and if it turns out that AI-supercharged error correction enables a much greater degree of messiness then that changes everything.
Basically the threat is real, and there's no sense sticking our heads in the sand, despite that being a thematically appropriate approach for nostr.
