I’ve worked with Bas. I respect him, but he is definitely a QC maximalist in a way. At the very least he believes that caution suggests the public err on the side of believing we will build them.
The actual challenge is we still don’t know if we can build QC circuits that factorize faster than classical both because the amount of qubits has gone from ridiculously impossible to probably still impossible AND because we still don’t know how to build circuits that have enough qbits to break classical algorithms larger or faster than classical computers, which if you’re paying attention to the breathless reporting would give you a very skewed perception of where we’re at.
It’s also easy to deride your critics as just being contrarian on forums, but the same complaint happens to distract from the actual lack of real forward progress towards building a QC. We’ve made progress on all kinds of different things except for actually building a QC that can scale to actually solve non trivial problems . It’s the same critique as with fusion energy with the sole difference being that we actually understand how to build a fusion reactor, just not one that’s commercially viable yet, and fusion energy would be far more beneficial than a QC at least today.
There’s also the added challenge that crypto computers only have one real application currently which is as a weapon to break crypto. Other use cases are generally hand waved as “possible” but unclear they actually are (ie you can’t just take any NP problem and make it faster even if you had a compute and even traveling salesman is not known to be faster and even if it is it’s likely still not economical on a QC).
Speaking of experts, Bas is a cryptography expert with a specialty in QC algorithms, not an expert in building QC computers. Scott Aronson is also well respected but he also isn’t building QC machines, he’s a computer scientist who understands the computational theory, but that doesn’t make him better as a prognosticator if the entire field is off on a fool’s errand. It just means he’s better able to parse and explain the actual news coming from the field in context.