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The Landauer limit [1] is relevant here. Even if you could theoretically make a processor that does it, it would take about 30 gigawatts of power for 1 year [2] to just do 2^128 bit flips (this is obviously a lower bound since it disregards the additional energy required to actually do the calculation). This is more than 1/100th of the world's current energy production. So it's not something that is going to be a concern for most people, and certainly not in the near future!

If the world had access to that kind of energy, I'm sure it'd be used for far more interesting things than finding a single hash collision.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer_limit [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute-force_attack#Theoretical_...

Edit: and while we're on the subject of inappropriately extrapolating Moore's law, if current performance-per-watt continues to double every 18 months I'd be interested in how long it'd take to even reach the Landauer limit. I can't seem to find out how much energy it takes to do a single bit flip in a modern processor online, so I can't do the calculation.



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