The Google Willow Viral Thread Is Missing the Part That Actually Matters for Crypto

The “Google just broke reality” tweet goes viral every few months. This week it made another lap. The numbers in it are real: Willow really did complete an RCS calculation in under five minutes that would take the world’s fastest classical supercomputer 10 septillion years. That is more time than the universe has existed, multiplied by a quadrillion. Sundar Pichai really did confirm that the result demonstrates quantum error correction working at scale.

The punchline tweet format is designed to make you feel like something happened today. What it does not tell you is that this specific milestone is from December 2024, and that by March 2026 Google had quietly published something far more important for crypto. Most people sharing the viral Willow content have not read it.

There was a comment in one of the threads this week from @Koki_San7 that cut through the noise. She wrote that the real conversation is not about speed in synthetic benchmarks, but about what happens to RSA and ECDSA when quantum computing becomes scalable. She asked whether modern digital security is ready for the post-quantum era. JP replied that when a quantum computer runs Shor’s algorithm at genuine scale, RSA and ECDSA encryption would become vulnerable, and that the open question is whether the crypto ecosystem upgrades fast enough or, as he put it, “falls asleep again.”