Quantum Computing and Encryption Breaking

Question

I read a while back that Quantum Computers can break most types of hashing and encryption in use today in a very short amount of time(I believe it was mere minutes). How is it p

Answer 1

The Wikipedia article does a very good job of explaining this.

In short, if you have N bits, your quantum computer can be in 2^N states at the same time. Similar conceptually to having 2^N CPU's processing with traditional bits (though not exactly the same).