OpenAI says its AI system has refuted the Exponential Time Hypothesis, a longstanding assumption about how hard certain logic problems are to solve. The disclosed result does not establish a practical attack on Bitcoin, and independent examination is still open.
OpenAI says its AI system refuted the Exponential Time Hypothesis in an Oct. 26 announcement, and researchers are now organizing an independent examination. The disclosed result does not establish a practical attack on Bitcoin.
What OpenAI claims, and what is unverified
The hypothesis concerns 3-SAT, a puzzle in which a computer must find true-or-false settings that satisfy a collection of logical rules. OpenAI's manuscript, dated Oct. 17 and revised Oct. 25, claims a deterministic algorithm that exactly counts the satisfying assignments of fixed-width Boolean formulas in subexponential time and polynomial space.
OpenAI says the result was verified in Lean, a proof assistant, but its scope note describes a weaker time bound than the manuscript's sharpest claim. The researchers organizing the examination have declined to certify the work. According to their letter: "Our involvement should not be taken as certification of the claim."
Why the result does not reach Bitcoin directly
Bitcoin's security rests on two separate tasks. Miners search for a block-header hash below a target, while a digital signature authorizes spending. Bitcoin's signature systems include ECDSA and Schnorr over the secp256k1 elliptic curve.
Refuting an assumption about worst-case SAT solving does not, by itself, show how to defeat those mechanisms. An attacker would still need to derive a private key from its public counterpart, and a practical attack would need a suitable encoding, an implementation and a cost comparison. The variable count in a SAT formula also is not interchangeable with the bit length of a cryptographic key or hash.
What the researchers say next
Ryan Williams, posting as @rrwilliams, said he, Russell Impagliazzo and Mohan Paturi had been asked to organize an open, independent examination, without NDAs or compensation. In a separate post, he said he had asked OpenAI to check whether existing cryptosystems were compromised and relayed that they were apparently safe. CryptoSlate notes that this is a second-hand account, not an independent cryptographic audit.
OpenAI itself says turning the theoretical advances into practical improvements requires significant further research.
Source: CryptoSlate
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