[anyfoo]

It’s not about the hashes, i.e. the proof of work part, it’s about the fact that bitcoin addresses are public/private key cryptography, like RSA.

Now I think bitcoin actually uses es elliptic curve cryptography (I don’t know, I really don’t care about bitcoin), but the hypothetical was more along the lines of “what if you could break public/private key cryptography”, and less about factorization in specific, anyway.

[heimatau]

Hmm. SHA-256 will be sunsetting probably within our lifetime due to the exponential nature of our computers. Which is probably why I assumed you'd be speaking about that function.

But a break in ECC would be...something extreme IMHO and according to multiple researchers, I believe, would happen after SHA-256 because ECC is more settled mathematics.