4 ms·

Novice question : Can in say 10-15 years, Bitcoin's crypto standards be bypassed using raw computing power? How about 20 years?

• jacques_chester 13y ago
  Without meaningful breakthroughs in attacks on the underlying cryptographic primitives, probably not. If it's to be broken, it will most likely be due to someone finding a flaw in the way those primitives are assembled. In the nearer term, the main risk is people finding attacks on the implementation (in practice nobody uses 3rd party implementations).
  • fragsworth 13y ago
    Even if a serious flaw in the current encryption algorithm is found, it's feasible to create a new encryption algorithm and support both, simultaneously, allowing people to transfer their coins over to the new one. If some quantum computing mechanism is developed that negates all cryptography entirely, then we will probably be living in a world with unlimited computing power and the robots will have taken over anyway.
• wmf 13y ago
  No. All modern crypto is designed to take at least hundreds of years to brute-force. Algorithmic attacks are what people worry about.
• crystaln 13y ago
  Possibly, but there is likely to be enough time to upgrade the network between the time it takes to crack a private to drops from 50 universes to 1 universe. That is of course precluding the discovery of a major flaw.
• tptacek 13y ago
  Probably not, in the sense of computers getting better and scaling up say Pollard-Rho. "Probably" because who knows what computers will look like in 20 years. But nobody knows what new attacks people will come up with, either against 256 bit ECC or SHA2.