[bonoboTP]

But in reality you'd need to do some complicated operations on each 64-bit item, right? When e.g. cracking a password or so.

I also don't understand what type of real-world application is being simulated here. I do understand that it is a simplified example, but of what?

The takeaway is that it is feasible to perform a single comparison operation for each 64-bit bitstring. But we don't just do a single operation per item in the real world.

[empath75]

The complicated operation will generally be a constant factor though. Let’s say it takes 100 times longer each cycle, now it’ll cost you $100,000 instead of $1000.

[saagarjha]

Yeah, you’d probably add an order of magnitude to this for most practical instances, but it’s still not completely unreasonable.