There's beed a lot of FUD and fun trading opportunities whenever something regarding the underlying bitcoin protocol occurs. We can always count on a nice bounce to trade or rescue us whenever this happens - because, well, nothing was really wrong. But what if it happened for real: Bitcoin stopped working compeltely and wasn't coming back up, or someone cracked EC and all the keys were compromised, etc. What would the trading chart look like? How fast would it go down? Would be there be any bounces? Where would the final bottom be? Draw a chart. Even if you made a good trade would the exchanges even let you withdraw fiat? Would they even be operating?
I came across this article about quantum computing..thought it was relevant.
http://nautil.us/blog/-how-classical-cryptography-will-survive-quantum-computers"For a general search problem, such as trying to find the key to a secret code by trying all of them, quantum computers are expected to have quadratic speed-up. For example, the Advanced Encryption Standard, approved by the United States government, has up to 2*256—or about a 1 followed by 77 zeros—keys. A quantum computer could make that same search as if there were only 2*128 keys—about a 3 followed by 38 zeros. On the one hand, that’s a lot faster. On the other hand, it’s still an awful lot of searching to do."
"The factoring problem falls into a category known as “hidden subgroup problems.” A group is a particular type of mathematical structure and a hidden subgroup is another structure inside it unknown to the codebreaker—in the factoring example, the product produces the group and the unknown factors produce the hidden subgroup. On hidden subgroup problems, quantum computers are predicted to get exponential speed-up. Factoring is faster than searching to begin with, so an ordinary computer could factor a number of size 2*15360 in the time it takes to search 2*256 keys. But a quantum computer could factor that same number in more like the time it takes to search 20,000 keys. That’s an enormous speed-up. It would pretty much destroy RSA, and the situation is similar with all of the other public-key systems currently in common use."
"Research is also being done into what is often called post-quantum cryptography, although a more precise name might be quantum-resistant cryptography. These are systems running on ordinary computers but based on problems that are not in the hidden subgroup category. These problems include solving systems of multivariable polynomials, finding the shortest distance from a point to an n-dimensional skewed grid of other points, and finding the closest bit string to a set of other bit strings."
Encryption is here to stay and will only grow more robust over time.
