Quoting Trent W. Buck (trentbuck@gmail.com):
When someone says "I need 16K RSA keys", don't they really mean "I want EC keys"?
Because, like, RSA needs to be a lot longer than EC to provide the same security level.
I absolutely take you seriously on such things, Trent, but wonder if you can refer me to background materials about cryptographic strength. (Certainly, I am behind my times on readings concerning ciphers.) A point Schneier often makes about cipher algorithms and crypto implementations is that, other variables being roughly equal, newer is bad and should be distrusted -- in the sense that we trust ciphers and implementations more if they've withstood many years of determined, expert attack. To illustrate his point, he said he _thought_ (and hoped) that his Twofish symmetric cipher was extremely good, but that Blowfish was a safer bet by pragmatic crypto standards, because Twofish was (then) brand-new, while Blowfish had proven robeust over many years of wide usage and testing.