Buterin says Bitcoin can handle network-layer attacks without needing the kind of broad social consensus required for deeper protocol changes.
Vitalik Buterin has rejected a warning that artificial intelligence could cause Bitcoin to lose half its value by weakening assumptions about the network’s security.
In reply to crypto commentator Liron Shapira, Buterin said the chance of AI actually breaking Bitcoin’s hashing or proof-of-work is “tiny,” while arguing that the harder issue would be moving the network through a security upgrade.
Buterin Sees the Bigger Risk in the Transition
Shapira posted that he had “50% confidence” BTC would crash 50% or more within two years because AI could undermine what people had imagined were Bitcoin’s security guarantees.
Buterin took the other side. He said he is optimistic about cybersecurity over the long run and sees the main risk as managing the transition itself, not a cryptographic failure, arguing Bitcoin should handle network-layer problems, the kind fixed by upgrading clients or mining pools, without needing broad social consensus.
“I expect BTC to handle at least any issues that do not require social consensus well (upgrading clients, mining pools, etc to deal with network-layer hacks is in this category) (and I think the probability of actual breaks on hashes or PoW is tiny),” he wrote.
Shapira came back later with a smaller number. “I’ve updated down to 40%,” he posted, crediting Buterin and a commentator named Eliezer for the shift.
Vista Labs pushed the debate toward coordination, arguing that AI would not need to break SHA-256 if it could shorten the period between finding a vulnerability and exploiting it to less than the time a decentralized network needs to agree on an upgrade.
“Does upgrade latency become the real security constraint?” the account asked.
However, analyst Crypto Patel framed Bitcoin’s strength as its capacity to adapt once new threats appear rather than any promise that it will never face one.
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Recent Attacks Show Where AI Can Matter
The concern is not entirely theoretical. As CryptoPotato reported in August, Bitcoin swap service Boltz suspended operations after AI-assisted attacks. The five-person team said automated probing had increased before attacks accelerated, leaving it without the resources to keep operating safely.
Furthermore, a recent security campaign found 4,962 software issues across 390 Bitcoin-related open-source projects in about 30 hours. The tally included 85 critical and 635 high-severity findings.
Another report published on August 10 found that Kimsuky, a North Korea-linked threat actor, had set up local AI environments and collected software for AI execution and automated agents. According to investigators, the group appeared to be preparing AI for malware development, data analysis, and attack techniques.
But replying to Buterin, crypto trader Hazenlee argued that stronger generative AI could make Bitcoin’s scarcity more relevant, given that AI can create content and new tokens cheaply, but cannot simply create ownership of existing BTC or force a decentralized network to accept a false history.
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