April 30, 2026
Honor, hype, and a looming code crack
Scott Aaronson on quantum: "Will you heed my warnings NOW?"
Top scientist gets a huge honor as commenters argue if the quantum panic is real yet
TLDR: Scott Aaronson celebrated a major science honor while also warning that future quantum machines could break common online security sooner than many people expected. Commenters split between mocking the hype with jokes and tiny demo results, and urgently asking what companies and engineers should do right now.
Scott Aaronson had a very big week: he announced he’d been elected to the US National Academy of Sciences, one of America’s most elite science clubs, then immediately swerved into a much spicier topic — warning that machines powerful enough to crack today’s internet security might arrive shockingly soon, with some experts whispering 2029. Aaronson’s own tone was part victory lap, part "please don’t call this my career finale," and the crowd absolutely ran with the second half.
The comments quickly became a full-on popcorn debate. One camp basically said: slow down, doom-posters. Skeptics mocked the hype by pointing out that the most famous quantum factoring demo is still hilariously tiny — with one commenter sneering that the record is basically 21, while another joked that a claimed breakthrough was matched by an 8-bit home computer, an abacus, and a dog. Ouch. Meanwhile, the phrase "The Shor of Damocles" stole the show as the thread’s accidental meme of the day, sending people from confusion to applause once they got the pun.
But the real anxiety came from the practical crowd: if this threat is real, what are engineers actually supposed to do right now? One commenter in full workplace-panic mode asked what a CTO or even a regular developer can do today, while another begged for the nerd equivalent of a simple swap: what’s the replacement for the internet’s current lock-and-key tools? In other words, Aaronson dropped a warning, and the community responded with the internet’s three favorite reactions: doubt, jokes, and low-key panic.
Key Points
- •Scott Aaronson says he was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in the 2026 class.
- •He names Maria Chudnovsky, Salil Vadhan, and Janet Yellen as among the other inductees mentioned in the NAS announcement.
- •Aaronson says he participated in a stacker.news AMA about quantum computing and blockchain and co-authored a Coinbase-convened position paper on quantum threats to cryptocurrencies.
- •He says recent papers from Google and Caltech/Oratomic changed the context even while the paper was being written.
- •Aaronson states that experts he trusts in quantum hardware and quantum error correction now say a fault-tolerant quantum computer capable of breaking deployed cryptosystems could be possible around 2029, though he says timing remains uncertain.