Quote from: DeathAndTaxes on July 15, 2012, 04:02:52 PM

Quote from: doobadoo on July 15, 2012, 03:50:56 PM

Quote from: RandomQ on July 15, 2012, 04:23:53 AM

Non Public information that would have an effect on BTC Price.
SR Shutdown,SHA-256 Weakness,etc

In all likelyhood we could switch to a new hashing algo before any real damage were done. Remember, numerous weaknesses were found in MD5. granted MD5 wasn't broken outright, but several algo weaknesses found significantly lowered the strength from 128 bit to something like 112 bit. The world abandoned MD5 for anything critical and everything was fine. Sha256, likely has no silver bullet style weakness. At worst I think one day we wake up and some dude found a big prime common factor or somehting and the crypto strength comes into question. On day 1 of the exploit Gavin patches to a new algo.

Couple of counterpoints.

1) Markets trade on perception not reality. If every single new channel, online blog, and tech site is gabbering nonstop about SHA-256 being fundamentally flawed it is going to affect the market.

2) If you think "Gavin" or any Bitcoin developer is going to patch the core algorithm of the network in 1 day you must be in some alternate universe. Maybe within 1 month if the flaw is fatal. I would say 3-4 months if the flaw is non-critical. Have you seen how flaw changes in Bitcoin protocol have been in the past and these were more like tinkering around the edges. Replacing SHA-256 with an alternate hash would be ripping the heart of the protocol out.

Nobody said "SHA-256 theoretical flaw = bitcoin insta-dies". However to think it wouldn't be bearish on price is kinda short sighted.

I'm sure there would be more pressing issues then Bitcoin if the SHA-2 family is broken or a 0-day exploit is found. Wink

(at least, for now)