CDR: Re: why should it be trusted?

Could a factoring breakthrough happen to convert this exptime problem to polynomial time? Maybe. I said as much. Is it likely? See discussions on progress toward proving factoring to be NP-hard (it hasn't been proved to be such, though it is suspected to be so, i.e., that there will never be "easy" methods of factoring arbitrary large numbers).

Geee... Since when are problems "proven" to be NP-hard?? Go back to your favorite undergrad institution and take a course on computational complexity again.

You don't appear to be familiar with the literature. I suggest you do some reading.

Yeah, right. And you are familiar.