24 makes it harder, but the same problem would occur father out into the future then.
I imagine all intelligent actors will continue to upgrade their custody strategies, but old, lost, or forgotten wallet would be vulnerable.
Discussion
Would it make sense for that supercomputer to waste years just to crack a Bitcoin key ? What about the waste in capital allocation?
The incentives are wildly misaligned for them to do this any time in the foreseeable. But given a powerful enough computer, there are likely many honeypot lost or old wallets out there that actually could hold massive amounts of BTC. (Satoshi's hypothetical) wallets for example)
Silicon also has a max potential that we are close to reaching it , the exponential growth won't be at the same pace as it is now .
They say quantum is the next step , but I doubt it , and quantum computers are not good at simple functions but helping with complex functions, and gusseting a key is a simple function.
I've heard that as well about silicon.
This exercise has honestly made me much more appreciative of bitcoins resilience. I'm mostly just curious is someone much more knowledgable around bitcoin's future security than myself has thought or written about this problem.
Thank you for doing the math for us ! I think it falls on the same category as quantum computers , it is so far on the future it's not something to worry about that now , and would make more economic sense to use this supercomputer to help you mine Bitcoin than to try to crack keys .
But in reality, neither would make economic sense.
Don't trust, verify ❤️
I work as an engineer and in that world there is often an emphasis on not solving for hypothetical future problems years before they happen. I think you are right that things like quantum are nowhere near close to even looking like a problem.