Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard have won the 2026 Turing Award for inventing quantum cryptography.

I am incredibly pleased to see them get this recognition. I have always thought the technology to be fantastic, even though I think it’s largely unnecessary. I wrote up my thoughts back in 2008, in an essay titled “Quantum Cryptography: As Awesome As It Is Pointless.”

Back then, I wrote:

While I like the science of quantum cryptography—my undergraduate degree was in physics—I don’t see any commercial value in it. I don’t believe it solves any security problem that needs solving. I don’t believe that it’s worth paying for, and I can’t imagine anyone but a few technophiles buying and deploying it. Systems that use it don’t magically become unbreakable, because the quantum part doesn’t address the weak points of the system…