[est31]

https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/635.pdf

> Boiling all water on the planet (including all starfish) amounts to about 2^24 lakes of Geneva and leads to global security: 114-bit symmetric cryptosystems, 228-bit cryptographic hashes, 2380-bit RSA. This needs to be done 16 thousand times to break AES-128, SHA-256, or 3064-bit RSA.

I think this paper isn't using Landauer's bounds though, but conventional computers. So maybe my claim was wrong, because we aren't 16 thousand times away from Landauer's bounds but millions [1].

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20141219043239/http://www.bloomf...

[johndough]

But why the starfish.

[alfiedotwtf]

Because if you're already boiling the oceans, you probably won't have enough left over in the budget for marine conservation.