Without commenting on the veracity of their "findings"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-07/a-swiss-company-says-it-found-weakness-that-imperils-encryption

This has always been the existential nightmare for me about cryptocurrencies

Being able to reverse a "one way" hash and defeat something like AES kept me up at night all the time. Elliptic curves are complex and are at the root of all interesting, poorly understood math. Emphasis on the poorly understood part.

This is why elliptic curves (the underpinning of Bitcoin/ crypto) were used to solve Fermat's last theorem, one of the hardest math problems of all time.

There is a reason why places like NSA keep all intercepted encrypted communications between adversaries like China and Russia, even if they cannot read them today.

Because they might be able to read them tomorrow, a year from now, or 10 years from now, by finding weaknesses in the underlying encryption whether by analytic means or brute force means or quantum computing means.

And let's be clear -- nation state encrypted communication techniques are the same as what is used to store the private keys for crypto, if not likely better.

The only quantum of solace I had for this sort of existential crypto threat was that any actor who had this capability would be foolish to just take all the crypto, because then the value and faith in it would all go to zero immediately and it would be worthless to them as well

this is not exactly the most reassuring thing, but it's something.

crypto currency, is well, dependent on crypto. and crypto is incredibly difficult, subtle, not obvious there are zero weaknesses, etc. This is why NSA employs the most PHD mathematicians in the world. Crypto is hard and should not be taken at face value to be safe.

So by storing something like priv crypto keys indefinitely on a public blockchain, you are victim to what the NSA does. Giving people a chance to break it in the future, at some point, with some breakthrough (mathematical, computational, quantum, etc.)

That key you thought was unbreakable to your BTC access is the same thing the NSA works on every day to attempt to break the encryption of the communications of nation states. There is no theoretical difference between those two tasks.