Overview
- On Monday, Vitalik Buterin publicly rejected Liron Shapira’s 50%‑confidence forecast that AI could halve Bitcoin’s price within two years and said the chance of anyone breaking Bitcoin’s core hashes or proof‑of‑work is tiny.
- Buterin disclosed that roughly 90% of his net worth is effectively aligned with his view and said many network‑layer attacks can be addressed by ordinary client and mining‑pool software upgrades without requiring social consensus.
- Reporting highlights concrete operational failures that show the real near‑term risk: a July COLDCARD key‑generation flaw that exposed wallets and an estimated loss of more than 1,000 BTC, and Boltz’s service suspension after AI‑assisted probing found exploitable bugs.
- Industry groups and firms have responded by asking AI labs to give vetted security teams controlled access to advanced models and by using defensive programs such as Anthropic’s Project Glasswing alongside formal verification and post‑quantum research.
- Markets have shown no immediate crash tied to the exchange, but analysts say the main danger is a transition gap where attackers using AI could find vulnerabilities faster than defenders can patch them, so watch for more audits, upgrades, and coordinated defensive testing.