Last month, a team of 24 Chinese scientists made waves in cybersecurity circles when it released a quantum computing paper that claimed to have found a way to crack the most common encryptions currently providing online security. Quantum experts didn’t expect that to happen for at least another decade. Is this a cue for the rest of us to panic?

It’s hard even for great minds in quantum computing to judge the validity of the Chinese claim based on science. But if we zoom out from the subject matter and look at the context in which the paper was released, the development would seem less alarming.