3 ms·
> Thus, fully populating a 128-bit storage pool would, literally, require more energy than boiling the oceans. This is actually an argument against 128 bit, be
by ktpsns 9y ago
> Thus, fully populating a 128-bit storage pool would, literally, require more energy than boiling the oceans.
This is actually an argument against 128 bit, because it clearly shows that 128 bit are unreachable and thus a waste. What about 96 bit?
- DaiPlusPlus 9y ago96-bit, and other non-power-of-two systems are cumbersome and error-prone to work with in C - which is often used when writing firmware for computer hardware. The real risks of economic damage caused by bit-fiddling bugs is much greater than the risk of bringing the universe’s thermodynamic heat-death ever so slightly nearer...
- speleding 9y agoI would think it's fairly easy to keep all calculations in C in 128-bit and just mask out the top few bytes when retrieving and storing. You could also argue that >64 bit values will be rare enough that they warrant their own code path if they are encountered as an optimization (perhaps they already do this?).