Time cost and energy cost. There's a minimum amount of energy needed to flip a bit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle https://en.wikipedia.org

Time cost and energy cost. There's a minimum amount of energy needed to flip a bit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle By taking this value, how much energy does it take to brute-force a 256-bit AES key (average case of 2^255 key guesses plus the cost of verification)? 1.59546665 × 10^56 joules This is about a billion times more energy than our Sun will ever produce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28energy%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28energy%...