up:: For Press
Every figure and where it comes from
Every number this resource uses, with 3 things attached to each one: a wording that states it accurately, the document it came from, and a note wherever the figure carries a qualifier that gets dropped in retelling.
The third column is where most errors originate. A projection restated as a measurement, a draft schedule restated as law, and an expert survey restated as a forecast are the 3 most common, and each has a correct version that’s just as strong.
The short version:
- Three figures carry qualifiers that get dropped: the retirement dates are a draft, the $7.1 billion is a projection with stated uncertainty, and the probability ranges are a survey of opinion.
- One figure should never be pinned, because post-quantum adoption across internet traffic changes continuously.
- The strongest number in the whole subject is a comparison, from 20 million qubits to under 1 million across 6 years.
- The most misused number is a qubit count, because a headline figure counts noisy physical qubits and the threshold is stated in error-corrected logical ones.
- Every figure below is freely checkable, apart from 1 paywalled journal article.
How far away is the machine?
| The figure | How to state it accurately | Source | What gets dropped |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20 million noisy qubits | The 2019 estimate of the resources needed to factor RSA-2048, from a peer-reviewed analysis | Gidney and Ekerå, Quantum 5, 433, 2021, arxiv.org | It’s an estimate of a hypothetical machine rather than a specification of a real one |
| Under 1 million noisy qubits | The 2025 revision of that same estimate, roughly a 20-fold reduction in 6 years | Gidney, 2025, arxiv.org | Same qualifier. The value is in the trajectory between the 2 papers rather than in either number alone |
| 28% to 49% | The range of expert opinion on the chance of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer within 10 years | Global Risk Institute Quantum Threat Timeline, 26 specialists, globalriskinstitute.org | It’s a survey of expert judgment rather than a calculated probability |
| 51% to 70% | The same survey’s range for within 15 years | Same | Same |
| 1994 | The year Shor presented the method that breaks today’s public-key cryptography | Shor, presented 1994, journal version SIAM J. Computing 26(5), 1997, arxiv.org | The journal version is dated 1997, so both years are correct for different things |
| Low thousands of physical qubits | The scale of the largest machines actually built | Compare against the resource estimates above | A published qubit count is noisy physical qubits, and the threshold is stated in error-corrected logical qubits, which take many physical qubits each |
What is encryption protecting?
| The figure | How to state it accurately | Source | What gets dropped |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 billion people | Using the internet in 2025 | ITU Facts and Figures 2025, itu.int | Nothing. A measured figure |
| 74% of the world | The share of the global population online | Same | Nothing |
| 28.9% of sampled configurations | The share of Nginx TLS configurations published on GitHub specifying an RSA key exchange with no forward secrecy | Balaji et al., 2026, arxiv.org | Four qualifiers, and the figure is misleading without them: the corpus is 8,443 configuration files scraped from public repositories rather than a scan of live servers; the paper never states which subset of TLS-enabled contexts the 28.9% is drawn from, so “28.9% of 8,443” is wrong; 42.6% of those contexts use non-production hostnames and 2,919 files come from dormant repositories; and the authors include a commercial post-quantum vendor and the bank that funded the study |
Which figures cover personal data?
| The figure | How to state it accurately | Source | What gets dropped |
|---|---|---|---|
| ~60% familial match | The share of genealogy-database searches for a person of European descent in the U.S. that already return a third cousin or closer | Erlich, Shor, Pe’er, and Carmi, Science 362(6415), November 2018, science.org | The population qualifier is load-bearing. Stating it for everyone makes it wrong |
| 6.9 million people | Exposed in the 23andMe incident | Texas Attorney General, texasattorneygeneral.gov | The company is now referred to as “Chrome Holding Co., formerly known as 23andMe” |
| 14,000 accounts | The number of compromised accounts that produced that exposure, through reused passwords | Same | The gap between 14,000 and 6.9 million is the point, and dropping the smaller number loses it |
| 26 million+ people | Had contributed DNA to the 4 leading commercial databases by the start of 2019 | MIT Technology Review, technologyreview.com | The same analysis projected past 100 million within 24 months, which is a projection rather than a count |
| 147 million people | Exposed in the 2017 Equifax breach | Federal Trade Commission, ftc.gov | Most were never Equifax customers and had no way to opt out of being in the file |
| Nearly 90% of homebuyers | The share of U.S. homebuyers holding a 30-year mortgage | Freddie Mac, myhome.freddiemac.com | Nothing |
| 6 years | The federal health-record documentation retention floor | 45 CFR § 164.316, govinfo.gov | State medical-record retention often runs longer, and the clinical facts stay true for a lifetime |
| ~4 million BTC | Bitcoin sitting in addresses with exposed public keys, roughly 25% of supply | Deloitte, deloitte.com | Exposure here means the public key is visible, rather than that the coins are currently at risk |
Which figures cover money?
| The figure | How to state it accurately | Source | What gets dropped |
|---|---|---|---|
| $7.1 billion | The projected cost of migrating priority U.S. federal civilian systems between 2025 and 2035, in 2024 dollars | Office of Management and Budget, July 2024, OMB report | Three qualifiers: it excludes national security systems, OMB calls it an initial projection with “a high, but expected, level of uncertainty,” and it can’t be scaled down to a single company |
| ~$100 billion | Estimated U.S. spending on Y2K assessment and remediation | U.S. Senate Special Committee, S. Prt. 106-42, govinfo.gov | An estimate rather than an audited total |
| ~$8.5 billion | The federal government’s share of that Y2K spending | Same | Same |
| At least $575 million | The Equifax settlement with the FTC, CFPB, and states | Federal Trade Commission, ftc.gov | The settlement was structured to reach higher, and “at least” is the FTC’s own framing |
| ~$1.4 billion | Merck’s claimed NotPetya losses | Reported figure, litigation resolved January 2024, Insurance Journal | A claimed loss in litigation that settled on undisclosed terms rather than an awarded amount |
| ~$9.14 billion | U.S. cyber insurance direct written premium in 2024, down about 7% | NAIC 2025 report on 2024 data, naic.org | The first annual contraction on record, which is the notable part |
| 850 billion | Projected global economic value created by quantum computing by 2040 | Boston Consulting Group, July 18, 2024, bcg.com | A consultancy projection to 2040, not a measurement. The same analysis projects a 170 billion market for hardware and software providers |
Which dates are the real deadlines?
| The date | How to state it accurately | Source | What gets dropped |
|---|---|---|---|
| After 2030 deprecated, after 2035 disallowed | The U.S. schedule for retiring today’s public-key cryptography | NIST IR 8547, initial public draft, csrc.nist.gov | It’s a draft. The years are NIST’s stated intent and could change in the final |
| 2035 | The whole-of-government goal of mitigating quantum risk “as is feasible” | NSM-10, May 4, 2022, bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov | The hedge sits inside the operative sentence, which makes this the softest date in the field and the most quoted |
| January 1, 2027 | Post-quantum required in all new U.S. national security system acquisitions | NSA CNSA 2.0 FAQ, media.defense.gov | It reaches commercial vendors through procurement rather than only government systems |
| December 31, 2030 and December 31, 2031 | U.S. federal civilian key establishment, then digital signatures, for High Value Assets and high impact systems | Executive Order 14412, June 22, 2026, whitehouse.gov | Excludes national security systems |
| December 11, 2027 | Full EU Cyber Resilience Act obligations | Reg (EU) 2024/2847, eur-lex.europa.eu | It binds manufacturers worldwide, and it names no algorithm and sets no post-quantum date |
| End of 2030 | Australia’s exit from traditional public-key cryptography | ASD Information Security Manual, cyber.gov.au | Scoped to Australian government, defense, and suppliers handling protected data |
| 2028 | UK expectation for completed discovery and a migration plan | NCSC, March 20, 2025, ncsc.gov.uk | Advisory rather than statutory, and used by UK buyers as a vendor expectation anyway |
| 25, 50, and 75 years | U.S. classification horizons | Executive Order 13526, archives.gov | 50 and 75 apply to defined categories rather than to classified material generally |
| August 13, 2024 | The date NIST finalized the first 3 post-quantum standards | NIST, nist.gov | Nothing. The single most useful date in the subject |
What does the precedent record show?
| The figure | How to state it accurately | Source | What gets dropped |
|---|---|---|---|
| 141 organizations across 20 industries | Intellectual property exfiltrated in a single documented campaign | Mandiant APT1, February 19, 2013, services.google.com | Each intrusion had to be worked by hand, which is what capped the number |
| 531 fraudulent certificates | Minted by the attacker in the 2011 DigiNotar breach | Fox-IT Black Tulip, 2012, enisa.europa.eu | ”At least” is the report’s own framing |
| ~300,000 people | Iranian users whose email was intercepted using 1 of those certificates | Same | Same |
| 1943 to 1980 | The span of the Venona project, from the intercepts to the project’s close | NSA, nsa.gov | Reading began around 1946, so the gap between collection and decryption is the point |
Which figures keep moving?
Two values in this subject change continuously, and pinning either one dates a piece within months.
| The figure | Why it moves | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Post-quantum adoption across internet traffic | It rises as browsers, servers, and networks deploy | Link the live dashboard rather than quoting a percentage: Cloudflare Radar |
| Qubit records | Manufacturers announce new machines regularly | The resource estimates are the stable comparison, and a raw qubit count says little without error rates and whether the result was independently reproduced |
Which figures belong to whoever said them?
A separate class: numbers that circulate in this field attached to a speaker or a vendor rather than to a study. Each is quotable with its owner named, and none is a finding.
| The figure | Whose it is | How to handle it |
|---|---|---|
| A Q-Day window of 2029 to 2030 | A vendor chief technology officer, stated at Quantum USA 2026 | A vendor estimate from a company selling post-quantum products. Attribute it, and set it against the published expert survey range rather than presenting it as a forecast |
| Migration taking 10 to 15 years, completing 2030 to 2035 | The same vendor speaker | A vendor’s projection of customer timelines. Attribute it |
| Post-quantum degrading network performance by up to about 1% | The same vendor speaker | A vendor performance claim. Attribute it, or source it to independent measurement |
| A Fortune-2000 enterprise running 68 to 75 security products | Ponemon Institute data, cited by a vendor at the same event | Secondhand citation of a research figure. Go to the Ponemon source before using it |
| Roughly half of a DOE supercomputer workload being acceleratable by a quantum computer | A DOE user-facility poll, cited by a named federal speaker | A poll cited secondhand. Attribute to the speaker and the poll |
| A 99.5% two-qubit gate fidelity | Rigetti, in 2 different senses | The same figure means 2 different things. 99.5% is an achieved median fSim result on Ankaa-3, an 84-qubit single-chip machine, reported December 2024. It is also a target Rigetti states for Cepheus-1-108Q, a 12-chiplet system generally available April 2026 and running at 99.1%. Ask which system and which gate type before quoting it |
| 97.5% readout fidelity | QuantWare, for its D-line processors | A two-product figure quoted as a processor specification. It is reached by pairing the processor with the company’s own amplifier, and the coherence and gate figures published beside it are reference-setup measurements from February 2024. Name the date and the configuration, or handle it as a vendor claim rather than a specification |
Source, vendor performance figures: Rigetti, “Rigetti Computing Launches 84-Qubit Ankaa-3 System; Achieves 99.5% Median Two-Qubit Gate Fidelity Milestone,” 23 December 2024; Rigetti, “Rigetti Announces General Availability of 108-Qubit System,” 7 April 2026, which states that the company “expects Cepheus-1-108Q to reach a median 99.5% two-qubit gate fidelity later this year”; QuantWare, “QuantWare releases Contralto-D and Soprano-D,” February 2024, quantware.com.
Source: Forum Global, “The Report: Quantum USA 2026,” Washington D.C., June 18, 2026. The publisher states that third-party figures, projections, intelligence-community characterizations, and vendor claims belong to the sources who advanced them and are not findings of Forum Global.
Questions people ask
Which of these numbers is the strongest? The pair from 20 million to under 1 million qubits across 6 years, because it’s 2 peer-reviewed analyses of the same problem and the movement between them is the evidence.
Which is the most commonly misused? A qubit count. A headline figure counts noisy physical qubits, while the threshold for breaking encryption is stated in error-corrected logical qubits, and each logical qubit takes many physical ones.
Can I say the government estimated the migration will cost $7.1 billion? Yes, with the scope attached: priority federal civilian systems, 2025 to 2035, excluding national security systems, and labeled by OMB as an initial projection with high uncertainty.
Can I say encryption will be broken in 2030? No, and no source here supports it. The 2030 dates are retirement schedules for the old algorithms rather than predictions about a machine.
Is the 60% DNA figure true for everybody? It’s specific to people of European descent in the United States, which is the population the study measured. Generalizing it makes the claim inaccurate.
Why is one source paywalled? The Science paper on familial matching sits behind a journal paywall. Every government document, court record, standard, and preprint listed here is freely accessible.
How often is this checked? Each page in this resource carries a last-verified date, and the draft schedules move as documents finalize.
Where to go next
- The primary documents behind every claim is the same material sorted by document rather than by number.
- Corrections and verification is how to report an error or verify a claim before publishing.
- What gets reported wrong covers the recurring errors and the accurate version of each.
- A timeline of the quantum transition puts the dated events in order.
- For Press is the full index.
Last verified 2026-07-30 · Maintained by Addie LaMarr, LaMarr Labs.