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At some point Bitcoin mining difficulty either:

1. must hit a ceiling and the rate of increase will significantly slow,

2. or Bitcoin mining will break SHA-256 and render it insecure.

I find 1 to be a the most likely outcome however the most plausible path for 2 would be a novel cryptanalytic attack on SHA-256 which could be exploited to increase mining power. It seems very unlikely that 2 would occur because mining power approaches the brute force limits of SHA-256.



No. There is no way for Bitcoin mining to "break SHA-256 and render it insecure". There isn't enough energy in the whole SUN to do that.


Well Bitcoin mining could "break SHA-256 and render it insecure" by:

1. exploiting cryptanalytic weaknesses in SHA-256,

2. successes in new computing paradigms such as a large scale quantum computer using Grover's algorithm.

3. or turning the local galactic cluster into computronium for SHA-256 miners. Although at that point we have bigger problems. =)

If you think SHA-256 will not be broken anytime soon then that suggests that you believe that mining difficulty increases will slow down.


> It seems very unlikely that 2 would occur because mining power approaches the brute force limits of SHA-256.

Can you elaborate on this a bit more? I'm not following what you mean by the "mining power approaches the brute force limits of SHA-256."


If Bitcoin mining power continues to increase exponentially, it will eventually get to the point that it will brute force the output space of the SHA-256. This won't actually happen because 2^256 is a very^256 big number.




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