Comment by tsimionescu

I don't think they meant "in O(1) steps", I think they meant "the day someone figures out how to keep many thousands of qubits entangled while operating on them with gates will be the same day we have the first QC that can start breaking encryption in reasonable time". Where, of course, same day is also an exaggeration. But the general point is that we need a single breakthrough to achieve this, and it's very hard to estimate how long a breakthrough might take to appear.