So should it make a difference to me that it takes 149,745,258,842,898 years to crack
or 50,955,671,114,250,072,156,962,268,275,658,377,807,020,642,877,435,085 years
To me, this is really unnecessary and I rather take the real and quantifiable performance benefits of a 128 bit key than the theoretical possibility that a 256 bit key is safer.
Why AES is more popular than Blowfish is because AES is used by the US government. Whether that is a good thing or not I'll leave it up to you. I still like Blowfish cause it's just so fast in encrypting as compared to AES and it's not something I see myself changing in the near future.
Also as per that article:
There is also a physical argument that a 128-bit symmetric key is computationally secure against brute-force attack. The so-called Landauer limit implied by the laws of physics sets a lower limit on the energy required to perform a computation of kT · ln 2 per bit erased in a computation, where T is the temperature of the computing device in kelvins, k is the Boltzmann constant, and the natural logarithm of 2 is about 0.693. No irreversible computing device can use less energy than this, even in principle.[2] Thus, in order to simply flip through the possible values for a 128-bit symmetric key (ignoring doing the actual computing to check it) would theoretically require 2128 − 1 bit flips on a conventional processor. If it is assumed that the calculation occurs near room temperature (~300 K) the Von Neumann-Landauer Limit can be applied to estimate the energy required as ~1018 joules, which is equivalent to consuming 30 gigawatts of power for one year. This is equal to 30×109 W×365×24×3600 s = 9.46×1017 J or 262.7 TWh (more than 1/100th of the world energy production). The full actual computation—checking each key to see if you have found a solution—would consume many times this amount.
Whatever that means
Of course if quantum computing has been discovered somewhere.....then all ciphers are at risk.
I think we're here to provide good secure encryption combined with speed and efficiency. We can of course beef up encryption higher and higher, but that would mean greater resources expended (and more costs) for questionable increases in security. We all have to find a balance and for now, we are satisfied with the level of encryption on our VPN services.
If someone wants to hide data that is so sensitive that it would involve the world's top experts combined with immense computing power to back it up to decrypt that data (and even then we aren't completely sure they'll break it)...well they shouldn't be buying a USD10.50/month VPN
But that's my cheeky two cents.