Buterin rejects AI-driven 50 percent Bitcoin crash warning, citing crypto-heavy net worth

[DigitalToday Seung-a Yoo, intern reporter] Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin (비탈릭 부테린) has voiced opposition to a forecast that artificial intelligence could cause the Bitcoin price to plunge more than 50 percent within the next 2 years.

On Sept. 7 (local time), overseas media including blockchain outlet CryptoSlate reported that Silicon Valley investor and AI risk analyst Liron Shapiro (리론 샤피로) said AI could shake assumptions investors have held about the security and resilience of the Bitcoin network. He put the probability of Bitcoin falling more than 50 percent within 2 years at 50 percent.

Buterin saw it differently. He said Bitcoin can handle security issues that can be addressed without social consensus, such as attacks targeting network infrastructure including clients and mining pools. He assessed the likelihood that AI could fundamentally break Bitcoin's hash function or proof-of-work (PoW) system as very low. Buterin said he would normally bet with Shapiro on the outcome, but his crypto holdings are effectively that bet already. He explained that about 90 percent of his net worth is invested in cryptocurrencies. He said the same logic would apply to Ethereum.

The difference in their views stems from the point that AI does not have to directly destroy Bitcoin's core cryptographic technology to shock the market. Shapiro argues that if AI finds large numbers of vulnerabilities that were previously hard to detect and shakes security assumptions investors took for granted, market trust could be damaged even if developers later fix the vulnerabilities. Buterin, by contrast, sees many AI-driven security issues as likely to remain at a level that can be fixed. As attackers use AI, defenders can also use the same advances to find vulnerabilities and respond, he said.