lmao I hope he gets desperate the next time bitcoin spikes & pays some cryptology firm to 'crack' it and they wipe it by accident.
lmao I hope he gets desperate the next time bitcoin spikes & pays some cryptology firm to 'crack' it and they wipe it by accident.
Should be able to just sit on it until encryption technology moves on. Eventually quantum computers will make existing encryption obsolete which will require quantum encryption. As long as he doesn't wipe it before then he will eventually be able to decrypt it.
Just have to hope the value doesn't crash before then.
I mean the problem with that is thinking the average Joe is going to have access, even paid, to quantum computers anytime soon. For rent quantum computers that can (enough qubits) and are available to rent to crack reasonable encryption from the 2000 or 2010s era would be deemed a national security threat because there are still leaked, encrypted docs and files, as well as data in transit which was siphoned encrypted with older schemes. The value of these things for national security purposes and for research in say the field of medicine means I think any private ones built are going to have their available time occupied for a very long time by customers with a lot more money. There's also the consideration that businesses who had stuff stolen from them that is of a serious trade secret and maybe rising to national economics secret level have stuff like ironkeys they've "lost" that if one could simply rent these things anytime soon for that could cause issues.
Additionally hard drives can suffer mechanical failures from age and even disuse and flash storage (and magnetic platters for that matter) can suffer bit-rot so there are no guarantees with time that it will still be recoverable.
Lastly, depending on the model of ironkey he used it could have used AES (although I think most older models of that era used RSA or other non-symmetrical algorithms which are quantum vulnerable).
Quite frankly I think (hope anyways) by the time that stuff comes along that he no longer cares because the US has dissolved and bitcoin collapsed.
FYI for anyone reading, AES, particularly AES-256 is not vulnerable to quantum computers in any meaningful way, the minor increase in cracking speed they present (baring other breakthroughs against the algorithm that can for instance halve the key size search space) means you can crack it in 5000 years instead of 5 million, hardly useful (it's actually worse than that but just an example). So if you're worried about the government and those NSA quantum computers, use AES. In fact ideally use cascading ciphers with AES as one of them so a failure in one does not grant access. Just don't lose your passwords and make sure they're sufficiently long and hard to guess.