Posted by: ReductiMat
It's not about trying to crack public key cryptography and hashing algorithms.
I misread and thought he meant security.
The larger computational power required, for generating a block in the chain, is in generating the block's hash in a specific format. Each block must include a nonce (very big random number), and once included, the hash must meet the format. Currently the hashing algorithm is SHA-256. The format is something like the first 50 bits generated must be all zeros. So you have to add a nonce to the block, generate the hash, and check if the first 50 bits are zeros. If not, you keep trying different nonces until the hash format is met. This could take seconds, or months, depending on the luck of coming across the a good nonce. There's no way to guess at a nonce that will have the best luck. This means you either get lucky quickly, or you have a lot of computing power that can generate more hashes in a given amount of time in order to improve your odds of finding a good nonce. Kinda like buying one lottery ticket versus a lot of lottery tickets.