[patrakov]

> Eventually, AES-256 can probably be brute-forced in a reasonable amount of time.

No. See https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/6141/amount-of-...

Time is not the bottleneck, energy is.

They invoke Landauer's principle which states that irreversible computation has an intrinsic cost in terms of energy per elementary operation, namely, k T ln(2) where k is the Boltzmann constant. Assuming brute-force search, more than 2^256 elementary operations would be needed, but that would require more energy than available if one converts the whole Sun's mass into energy.

[gymbeaux]

VERY interesting read, thank you for that.

It’s worth noting several people’s answers state something to the effect of “quantum computing might be able to do it” and indeed I don’t expect an i9 or a ThreadRipper to ever defeat AES-256.