With around 26,000 qubits, the encryption could be broken in a day, the researchers report in a paper submitted March 30 to arXiv.org. Another prevalent form of encryption, RSA–2048, would require 100,000 qubits and 10 days to break, according to the researchers, from Caltech and quantum computing company Oratomic in Pasadena, Calif.

Google's new whitepaper says it could take only minutes for a quantum system to crack Bitcoin.