Bitcoin Forum

Shouldn't take too long to brute force the keys with several pooled ASICs.

This does not make any sense - care to elaborate?

There is no bitcoin held in hostage. There is a bitcoin waiting to be mined and solved and given out with its 24 friends. But these bitcoins won't be done in only a few years, they will still keep coming till about 2100-2140, depending on how fast our hardware gets.

Wow, that's a great image, :). I read through it as well. The problem here is that these laws are still theories and can be broken. Will they? Probably not. But there is still a slight possibility.

If we can assume technology is always improving, then eventually, at an indeterminate time in the future, Bitcoin's crypt will be broken (not by brute-forcing, but by a security flaw we've yet to discover.)

However, the great thing about Bitcoin is that it can easily switch to another form of encryption, which I presume will happen before SHA256 is broken.  So even if SHA256 fails, Bitcoin can chug along with the next best encryption.

Satoshi has invented Bitcoin and given it to the community, saying that he is holding it hostage isn't very fair.

Here's a rough ballpark example, assuming:
Your several ASICs have a combined 500 GH/s
You'd have to make 2^96 possible guesses (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=24268.0) to get Satoshi's address

(2^96 hashes) / (500,000,000,000 hash/s) = 1.58456325×10^17 seconds
That's about 5 billion years.

Or about 500 million years longer than the Earth's been around :P

Why hack a block for a mere 25btc every ten minutes.

This is not about a weakness in SHA256, but human error. Satoshi is, after all only a H4cker.

Maybe he does. You never know.

I have no idea what you're saying ;D  I recommend reading up more on Bitcoin and how it works.

or Bitcoin.

I love this image.  Great tool when explaining bitcoins.  Thanks for posting.