Cardano founder rebuts Vitalik: Lattice cryptography should not be abandoned due to AI concerns.

BlockBeats news, October 9: Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson published a rebuttal to Vitalik Buterin's views on post-quantum cryptography from two days earlier. Vitalik argued that AI-accelerated mathematical research could weaken the concrete security of lattice-based cryptography, including ML-DSA and FHE, and said Ethereum's lean roadmap is therefore shifting toward pure hash-based signatures; he also suggested that key sizes for lattice schemes be increased by about 10x, and that privacy protocols should keep encrypted notes off-chain as much as possible.

Hoskinson said this judgment lacks a nameable attack and cost model. The number field sieve cannot be simply analogized to lattice problems, the parameters of ML-KEM and ML-DSA already account for decades of sieve and enumeration attacks, and quantum attacks on ideal lattices have not touched current modular lattice schemes; by contrast, hashes such as Poseidon used by Ethereum have stronger algebraic structure themselves. Hoskinson argued that abandoning the already deployed hybrid ML-KEM before an attack appears would instead leave traffic exposed to classical cryptography for longer, worsening the "harvest now, decrypt later" risk.