The Clock Is Ticking on Encryption - #0077, Itamar Sivan

I’ll be honest: I entered into this most recent conversation for The Spiro Circle knowing almost nothing about quantum computing. I said as much to my guest, Itamar Sivan, co-founder and CEO of Quantum Machines, before we even started recording. That’s alright - most people don’t really understand it, he told me. Even scientists used to laugh at the idea that quantum computing would ever be commercially viable.But then, about halfway through our conversation, he said something that piqued my curiosity and made me put down my notes.The threat isn’t that quantum computers will simply ‘make things faster’. It’s that they’ll make things possible that are currently impossible. And one of those things is breaking the encryption that protects everything - and keeping cryptographers up at night. He cited potential examples as banks, messages, the NSA, and Bitcoin.“Quantum computers are not interesting because they’re going to take problems we solve today and solve them faster,” Sivan told me. “But rather they will take problems today we deem as impossible and make them possible.”The mechanism is an algorithm called Shor’s algorithm, which can factorize enormous numbers at speeds no classical computer could approach. Modern encryption is built on the assumption that factorizing very large numbers is effectively unsolvable. But by taking away that assumption, the entire architecture collapses. “Something that would take a hundred thousand years might be solvable at the scale of minutes,” he told me. Quantum Machines (QM) is a Tel Aviv-based company that has raised $280 million to build the orchestration layer running quantum processors. Founded in 2018, customers include academia, national labs, and the private sector. What struck me was that he raised this before it exploded as a mainstream story. At the time of our recording, he flagged that a newly published paper suggested quantum computers would need far fewer qubits to break encryption than previously thought. “We’re still digesting it. If they’re right, we’re going to see some big changes in the world in a few years.” And almost as an aside: “One of the claims is that it will be able to break the underlying encryption used for Bitcoin. Just that itself could be a big impact.”Research published between May 2025 and March 2026 shows that breaking widely used cryptographic systems may require far fewer quantum bits than previously thought. Estimates dropped from around 20 million physical qubits in 2019 to under one million by 2025. Papers from Caltech and Google in early 2026 prompted one Bitcoin security researcher to estimate a 10% chance that a quantum computer recovers a Bitcoin private key from an exposed public key by 2032. In April 2026, a researcher successfully broke a 15-bit elliptic curve cryptography key using publicly accessible quantum hardware — a 512-fold improvement over the previous public demonstration just months earlier. Google has already set a 2029 deadline to migrate its own authentication services to post-quantum cryptography. The so-called “harvest now, decrypt later” threat (adversaries collecting encrypted data today, waiting for quantum capability to mature before cracking it) means the clock is ticking, even though many still believe their things will be protected for many more years. Sivan’s broader point, the one I kept coming back to, is that quantum won’t replace the computing infrastructure we’ve built - but instead plug into it. It means the vulnerabilities we’ve built into that infrastructure travel with us.“Not a question of if,” he told me as we finished. “A question of when.”I didn’t know much about quantum computing before this conversation. But I think I know enough now to think that answer should concern all of us! Watch a 5-minute preview of our conversation on this topic, here: Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe