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by JohnStrange 3106 days ago
Bitcoin and other crypto coins are a neat idea until their underlying cryptographic primitives are broken. Then they will immediately loose all of their value. Every cryptosystem of the past has been broken at some time.
2 comments

Bitcoin has problems but I really don’t think that is one of them https://www.quora.com/Has-the-Bitcoin-blockchain-itself-ever...
Indeed. The coin is only as strong as it's cryptography, and given enough time, all ciphers can and will be broken.

Until that happens, there's still money to be made!

> and given enough time, all ciphers can and will be broken

Not all ciphers... 3DES and GOST have no practical breaks after 40 years of cryptanalysis (all attacks have > 2^100 time or memory complexity)

Any secure modern 256 bit symmetric primitive is likely safe from large quantum computers.

What will continue to be be broken are encryption protocols and systems that misuse modern secure 256-bit primitives. So we will continue to see things like the BEAST attack because non-cryptographers continue to invent their own encryption protocols with alarming frequency.