The only think that would irrevocably kill Bitcoin is breaking private keys (ie discovering others private keys, or signing transactions without private keys). A fork could not solve it as there'd be no way to prove which coins you actually owned before the fork.
theres no speculation that this exists, but bitcoin wouldnt last in a commercial world of quantum algos
AND even if the elliptic curve cryptography of bitcoin is broken, say you can solve it in a year/month/week/day, the fact is most BTC unspent transaction outputs (UTXO's) are scripted "pay to public key hash".
The entity proving ownership of the UTXO needs to show a public key (that is so far unknown ... if they haven't reused this address before), AND this public key needs to hash into the address, AND the signature signed by the private key verified.
So if somebody announced they had solved secp256k1 and could break it in 1 week, your funds are safe. (1) They probably don't know your public key. Relax. And (2) You just wait for the BTC soft fork to support new crypto, then do a transfer to yourself. You transmit your transaction to the mempool (exposing your public key for the first time), and it will be mined in 10-30 minutes. Not enough time for the hackers to monitor the mempool and come up with a valid signature. Then your new UTXO is a different spend script for how to spend it next time using some new unbreakable crypto.
Thread below indicates what happened is they were incredibly naive and eventually used a US exchange wallet. Just script kiddies really.
https://twitter.com/intangiblecoins/status/14020730011899125...
It wasn't darkside planting the ransomware afaik, but it was someone wanting to get paid through their affiliate program.
It's like if some dumbass was beating the crap out of people to steal their money and everyone in the boxing community was suprised that he's not a world class boxer.
Preimage attacks tend to be much more rare than collision attacks. MD5 for example still has no publicly known practical preimage attacks.
If FBI could crack smartphone encryption/protection from multi trillion dollar company I'm speaking about Apple and that terrorist's Iphone then they do pretty much anything.
That's only if the key was derived from a weak password, which allows it to be brute-forced with standard password scanning techniques. If you're even slightly concerned with security you let a computer generate a fully random key using the proper amount of entropy—preferable on an air-gapped system or an HSM (hardware wallet). No one is going to be "recovering" private keys which were generated and handled securely without a very large budget and physical access to the storage medium.
While it's possible this it he FBI flexing some muscle that they have a backdoor into bitcoin's hashing algorithm, what seems much more likely (to me) is:
There is a more sophisticated hacking group which created this particular ransomware package. They sell this ransomware package to less sophisticated criminals.
(https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/10/22428996/colonial-pipelin...)
Is it so hard to imagine a scenario where the more advanced creators of this ransomware kit gave instructions to their purchasers on things like private keys, and the end user simply ignored them?
Somebody ignoring a warning when installing a software, and that allowing the FBI to subpeona access to the server where it was running, and grab this private key, seems FAR more likely to me than the FBI having a backdoor into BTC, or this all being a cover spy novel plot, or anything like that.