[gwern]

I'm not sure I buy the starting premise of sequencing proteins being impossible. They seem to think that you need a large sample of a lot of duplicates to do mass spec on, but I was under the impression that single-protein sequencing was increasingly possible? eg. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/11/211104140836.h... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-021-01143-1 If you can just sequence the 'unclonable polymer', then there's no security at all.

Maybe there's some fundamental reason that specific approach won't work, but when we consider the massive improvements in DNA sequencing and analytical chemistry and nanotech over the past century, seems like we should have very little confidence that proteins will remain unreadable for the indefinite future. (Whereas things like integer factoring seem a lot more robust...)