Quantum is absolutely over-hyped. But so are many "really exciting but far off" projects. And so is AI (he says, having gotten a lot of funding to work in machi

Quantum is absolutely over-hyped. But so are many "really exciting but far off" projects. And so is AI (he says, having gotten a lot of funding to work in machine learning systems). But that doesn't mean that it's bad to continue funding research into it at some level, in the same way that we fund fusion research, and all-optical computing, etc. It's just a question about balance. Unlike, say, blockchain, we know there _are_ useful applications for a quantum computer; cryptography, as you noted, but also things like quantum chemistry, and possibly some optimization problems. But they're also quite far off and many require stable qbits way beyond what we can build today. It's a shame that funding at some levels requires excessive hype. It's as much a condemnation of our science funding system as anything.