That is true, you truly do not know if a bullet proof vest is bullet proof until a bullet hits it. Thus, it is all speculation until one gets to that croassroad.

The semiconductor industry is only now facing an issue that it did not have to deal with 40 or so years ago: noise. There are now many avenues being purused to get around it, 3D chips, carbon nanotubes, or even altering other aspects of the software stack to gain efficiency that, for the most part, came from chip advancement.

Noise is inherent in quantum and a problem they have from the start. The natural instability that is within this realm offers an additional challenge that researchers are attacking. However, going from 60 qubits to the 1M-10M many are estimating will be required to do what is being discussed here will require a lot of breakthroughs. The idea of doing something on a smaller scale is much easier than scaling up. It will be interesting to see how this is overcome.

That said, since it is not an overnight, hey look what we created, quantum research will affect all aspects. So while we can focus upon the ability to "attack" encryption system, we also can see the same breakthroughs, as they come, applied to storage and transmission. While it might not be a 1:1 benefit ratio, there will be some correlation. Thus, we could see improvements in what the media likes to call the "quantum internet".

As for the quantum-lite that you mentioned, we will certainly see a mixture of quantum and classical, especially at the start. For this reason, the computational power of quantum will be tied to applications developed for classical computing. Again, the same way we have quantum operating as a threat to the present encryption, it is possible that the same quantum technology can be applied to protect the classical applications.

Naturally, this is all spec and we will see how much acceleration takes place over the next 10-15 years. We know the pace will only increase so I guess it is a matter of which side gets there first: those who want to break encryption versus those who want to protect it. What is interesting is it is many of the same parties (governments) on both sides.

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