Hash Me If You Can: Cryptographer Warns AI Might Finally Get Better at Math Than Your Wallet 🔐

A Johns Hopkins cryptographer is raising concerns that advances in artificial intelligence could one day unravel the mathematical foundations protecting Bitcoin and Ethereum wallets. Matthew Green issued the warning on October 8, 2026, days after OpenAI announced on October 6 that an unreleased AI model had produced 722 mathematical manuscripts spanning 372 groups of results, while attempting roughly 4,000 unsolved problems whose findings remain under evaluation. "I think we might lose public key cryptography," Green posted on X, though he later clarified that he was aware of no imminent cryptographic breakthrough and instead feared AI could surface mathematical weaknesses decades of human research had missed.

Bitcoin and Ethereum rely on elliptic-curve cryptography to secure transactions, using a problem so complex that reversing a public key to recover its private key is considered practically impossible. An AI-discovered shortcut to that calculation could expose private keys, putting $BTC wallets with visible public keys and $ETH accounts that have signed transactions at risk. Green noted that what is currently treated as 128-bit security could in reality be closer to 96 or 108 bits, a shift that would make attacks roughly one million times cheaper, though potentially still costly enough to deter them. He questioned how defenders would scale protections going forward, asking: "But crank them up to what?"

The concern extends beyond cryptocurrencies to online banking, secure web traffic, and the post-quantum standards approved in 2024 by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, including the lattice-based schemes ML-KEM and ML-DSA. Stefano Gogioso, CEO of Spooqy and a lecturer at the University of Oxford, pushed back on the alarm, arguing that "most of the open problems solved by OpenAI with their new models were actually rather close to a solution, conceptually speaking, and that mathematicians working in the field would have come to solutions soon with new tools in their hands." Blockstream CEO Adam Back dismissed the warning as "dubious," pointing to alternatives like SHRINCS, a hash-based signature system developed by Blockstream researchers. No specific AI-driven cryptographic attack on Bitcoin or Ethereum has been reported, and security levels across major networks remain unchanged as of publication.