Call it the singularity. One day, maybe a decade from now, a message flashes across the internet: “Elliptic curves cracked!” Elliptic curve cryptography, or ECC, is the foundation beneath bitcoin. Wouldn’t the discovery of a hole in this code destroy the currency—and take down any coin exchange? I posed the question to Brian Armstrong, who co-founded and runs Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange. He can’t prove that there won’t be some mathematical shortcut compromising bitcoin keys. But he considers the risk low. “Ten years in, there's a ton of people who have looked at this code,” he answered, in an interview ... (full story)