Late reply, but it is my duty to correct anyone who is wrong on the Internet.
That's not how it works. The 'Advanced Encryption Standard' is AES-256, which means 256 bits.
Public key crypto is inefficient and typically uses 2048-bit keys to achieve security equivalent to guessing a 112-bit key. This is the encryption used for websites. I don't know about Bitcoin.
quantum computing is a computer which operates under ternary
Ternary computers have existed for a long time, but the extra efficiency was never worth the more sensitive electronics required for them. The idea of quantum computers being ternary probably comes from the common bad explanation that qubits can be in a third state that's both 1 and 0 at the same time. Qubits are simply unintuitive and can't be explained in one sentence to a lay audience.
But if I did try to explain qubits to a lay audience, I would say that a qubit being both 1 and 0 at the same time is most akin to listening to two songs at the same time. Shor's algorithm would be like listening to a song for every possible private key simultaneously. With that many songs playing, you can't understand any of them, but you can pick up on structure like if most songs were the same tempo.
Bet that quantum computing is coming and bet it will come faster than you can fucking imagine and bet it will fuck everything up. Once AES-256 is cracked and BTC is threatened, guess what will happen? They will centralize. The newest standard encryption will require quantum computers to deploy
Quantum computing is definitely progressing slower than AI (mainly because research into fast quantum algorithms usually ends up with proving that quantum computers can't outperform normal ones on the problem) , but fast enough to make people switch to post-quantum crypto. Post-quantum is just normal crypto with different base math that's believed to be hard for both quantum and normal computers (i.e. instead of factoring numbers, it's
inverting noisy linear algebra). No quantum computers are required.
It has uses for sure, but it's also pretty limited. It's good for encryption, breaking encryption and solving NP problems faster but that's about it. It's not like it's going to make normal computing faster or anything other than in those specific cases.
Quantum computers can not (to our knowledge) solve all NP problems. Prime factoring is believed to be hard but easier than the hardest NP problems, and it has a very special structure that makes it easy to solve with quantum computers. Most problems don't have structure like that to allow large quantum speedups.