[Klwohu]

You probably understand how serious this is, so many people are going to become very emotional as this strikes at the very foundations of the Internet and digital security as we know it. The reactions I've seen so far do seem very emotional and this will only become much, much worse if there's a PoC which is produced.

[not2b]

What does emotion have to do with it? For many years, every time someone claims to have broken RSA the response is the same: here is a test case you (the alleged RSA breaker) should be able to crack if your claims are correct. Put up or shut up. That seems like a fair, just-the-facts response.

[ajarmst]

Internet and digital security? This strikes at the very foundations of number theory.

[Jweb_Guru]

Ehhhhhhh. I'm not sure I'm aware of anything in number theory that would substantially change if a fast factoring algorithm were discovered, outside of its applications to cryptography. It'd be very likely that a fast factoring algorithm exposed some unusual structure about the natural numbers, I guess?

[ajarmst]

I was exaggerating for effect, but yeah. The existence of a polynomial time prime factoring suggests the existence of a useful predictive pattern in the distribution of primes. That would break the Twin Prime Conjecture and possibly refute Riemann. Undermining those starts tearing the foundations apart. I’m almost certain that won’t have just happened.

[Jweb_Guru]

We already know there is plenty of structure in the distribution of primes, so I don't see why finding some that can be exploited by a clever algorithm makes that much of a difference to foundational concerns. In fact, I'm pretty sure that even a proof of P=NP, which obviously subsumes fast factoring, wouldn't have any intrinsically interesting non-algorithmic consequences for proofs in number theory that don't directly assume factoring is hard (but this could just be ignorance on my part); all the supposedly absurd consequences people point to like the PH collapsing are more or less restricted to computer science.