Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin: Memory Access Is O(N^(1/3)) — Impact on Cryptography and Future Computing Models

COINOTAG News (October 5) reports that Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a technical note arguing that conventional assumptions—treating arithmetic and memory access as equal unit-time operations—are misleading, asserting that memory access scales as O(N^(1/3)). He illustrates that an eightfold increase in memory capacity can roughly double read/write latency, a characteristic with measurable impact on computational cost and latency-sensitive systems. This observation carries concrete implications for cryptography, algorithm optimization and blockchain engineering, where memory-induced bottlenecks affect transaction throughput and consensus-layer performance. Buterin advocates updating theoretical computing models to better capture the real-world memory hierarchy and hardware constraints, enabling more accurate assessments of protocol scalability and capital allocation for infrastructure and node operators.