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Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently took to the X social media network to advocate for stronger cryptography standards.
Buterin has calculated that Bitcoin’s cumulative proof-of-work (the sum of all computational effort expended on mining) stands at roughly 2^96 hashes based on recent difficulty data. This marks a significant computational milestone equivalent to 96 bits of security.
Buterin has credited Ethereum researcher Justin Drake for advocating 128-bit security levels (as seen in proposals like BLS12-381 curves and the Lean Ethereum roadmap). This would make it possible to future-proof against growing hash power.
Staying ahead
Bitcoin secures itself via the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm, which secures the network by requiring miners to perform billions of SHA-256 hashes to find valid blocks.
The cumulative PoW represents the total “energy barrier” an attacker would need to overcome to rewrite history.
Reaching 2^96 total hashes means Bitcoin’s chain is now protected by the equivalent of ~96 bits of brute-force security. This, of course, is an enormous amount of real-world computation.
Buterin has used this specific milestone to argue that cryptographic primitives across the industry should target at least ~128-bit security levels. In such a way, they would be able to stay comfortably ahead of growing computational power.
Many older crypto systems effectively provide only ~128 bits of security against certain attacks, which could make them potentially vulnerable.
