This leads to me to think about the longer term viability of bitcoin. Bitcoin uses a combination of RIPEMD and SHA256. Given the sha-2 family was released in 2001, when is SHA-2 going to go into depreciation cycle and what does that mean for the bitcoin network.

Given that there are plenty of op-codes left, the network can probably easily start switching into in the next generation of hashing algorithms.

This is the beautiful thing about open networks, it evolves organically. Whereas you can't say the same about bank protocols.