Studying Comptia Security+. Presently studying cryptographic algorithms and the history of cryptography. I feel like the quantum treat is at least 20 years away.

Please take what I say with a massive grain of salt. I'm not a dev, nor a coder. I'm simply studying for something that can bolster my career moving forward.

Doing a brief search on the world's first invented cryptographic algorithm, known as "Data Encryption Standard", it was invented in the 1970s. It was broken by a brute force attack in 1997 that took 56 hours to complete. There were attempts to extend the usefulness of DES by (my own words, no one elses) tripling the number of times it encrypts and re-encrypts information. DES was 56-bit encryption. "Triple DES" was essentially 111 bit encryption.

At this point, organizations came together to formulate a new encryption standard and created a cryptographic algorithm for web browsing and information sharing that almost everyone uses today known as "Advanced Encryption Standard" (AES).

My postulation is that, given the timeline between the introduction of DES to the time it was cracked, and given the introduction of quantum computers and that they are presently very weak (not to mention the fact that the components need to operate at nearly absolute zero (literally -273 degrees celsius (-460 degrees farenheit))), I view the quantum threat to Sha-256 as null now, and needing at least 20 years of development to break sha-256. Further, for perspective, to construct a quantum computer that could do this in today's numbers, the computer would need to be the size of a football field.

All of the difficulties associated with breaking SHA-256 placed to the side, would it be possible to use a soft-fork similar to speedy trial back in 2021 to move to a new hashing algorithm?