Crypto Gurus Concerned AI Is Poised to Crack Blockchain Math, Allowing Hackers to Steal Funds With Impunity

As tech companies continue to claim their AI models are capable of cracking some of the toughest problems that have stumped mathematicians for decades, the crypto community is starting to become uneasy.

As Business Insider reports, certain luminaries of the scene are concerned that AI could unlock blockchain wallets, whose public keys are currently protected by nearly ironclad mathematical computation.

“Yesterday’s OpenAI drop made it clear that mathematical superintelligence is upon us,” Ethereum researcher Justin Drake tweeted this week. “They say there are weeks where decades happen. We are about to live through weeks where centuries of mathematical progress happen.”

As a result, Drake called “upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for ‘bunker mode,'” recommending crypto holders to move their assets to “fresh addresses, i.e. addresses whose pubkeys remain hidden behind a hash,” or a cryptographic mathematical function that acts like a digital fingerprint.

While the precise threat of an AI model capable of cracking causing crypto armageddon remains unclear, the community has already been wary of a separate threat in the form of quantum computers, which experts warn could eventually break current encryption algorithms by drawing on a qubit-based architecture.