Recently, Vitalik has frequently discussed the security of Ethereum and AI. His viewpoints are indeed worth our attention and consideration.

Regarding the security of Ethereum, Vitalik mentioned an extreme case in an interview.

Binance is widely recognized as the largest CEX in the industry, and thus it is assumed that the amount of Ethereum held by Binance is among the top in the industry. With such a large amount of Ethereum, people naturally associate a "centralized" risk: if Binance were to use the Ethereum it holds and operate corresponding nodes to launch an attack on the entire network, could the Ethereum network still function normally?

To this, Vitalik's answer is no.

Why?

Because to attack Ethereum, Binance would need a cost of 48 billion dollars.

Clearly, his conclusion is considered from the perspective of economic profit. In a situation where the benefits are not obvious and the costs are so high, what motivation would there be to initiate such an attack?

Since the inception of Bitcoin, the entire operational mechanism of the crypto ecosystem has been built on an economic incentive/punishment mechanism. It assumes that attackers will not act without reason, disregarding profit and cost, to do something that offers no return.

Therefore, in terms of mechanism design, as long as the cost of an attack is far greater than the potential reward, it is generally assumed that the likelihood of an attack occurring is low, and security can be ensured.

Further, how is this 48 billion dollars calculated?

According to current network data, approximately 32 million ETH are staked in the Ethereum network. To launch a 51% attack, one would need to control over 50% of the ETH, which is 16 million ETH.

Based on the ETH price at the time of Vitalik's interview (3,000 dollars), the total market capitalization of 16 million ETH would be 48 billion dollars.

However, if such an attack were truly planned, I believe the actual cost would be significantly higher than 48 billion dollars.

This is because attackers would need to continuously purchase Ethereum on the market. Once such actions persist, they would inevitably lead to an unusual and sustained rise in the price of Ethereum, which would attract a large number of speculators to buy in, thereby exponentially pushing up the price of Ethereum. This would further raise the price at which attackers need to buy Ethereum.

What does spending 48 billion dollars to attack Ethereum mean?

I looked up the recent military expenditures of the top five countries in global GDP rankings, and the results are as follows:

1. United States, 916 billion dollars

2. China, no precise figures, estimated to be second in the world

3. Germany, 107 billion dollars

4. Japan, 60 - 70 billion dollars

5. France, 70 billion dollars

Based on this data, to attack Ethereum would require spending half or even more of the annual military expenditure of Germany, Japan, and France, or 5% of the military expenditure of the United States.

Therefore, at this level, the only countries in the world capable of attacking Ethereum alone are the United States and China, while other countries would face enormous costs to launch such an attack.

Further speculation leads us to think that if the price of Ethereum reaches ten thousand dollars, then the cost to attack Ethereum would reach 160 billion dollars.

At this level, it seems that only the United States and China would be able to attack Ethereum alone, and even for these two countries, the cost would be immense.

Thus, based on this attack cost of 48 billion dollars, Vitalik believes that Ethereum's security now has redundancy. He suggests that if economic thresholds are moderately relaxed and the robustness of the P2P network layer and consensus layer is strengthened, the overall security of Ethereum will be enhanced.

In my impression, this seems to be the first time Vitalik has used intuitive, quantitative data to measure the security of Ethereum in a public interview.

This line of thinking and logic is very helpful in understanding the security of Ethereum, so it is certainly worth sharing with readers.

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