Vitalik Buterin rejects claims AI could crash Bitcoin by 50%

Vitalik Buterin just told one of Silicon Valley's most vocal AI doomsayers to sit down. The Ethereum co-founder fired back at angel investor Liron Shapira's prediction that artificial intelligence could crater Bitcoin's price by more than half within two years, calling the underlying premise, that AI could fundamentally compromise proof-of-work security, "extremely low" probability.

The exchange, which played out publicly on September 7, quickly rippled across crypto media. Shapira had posted his thesis with what he described as 50% confidence: AI advancements could shake Bitcoin's security foundations enough to trigger a price collapse of over 50%. Buterin wasn't having it.

What made Buterin's response more than just another Twitter debate was the skin in the game. He revealed that approximately 90% of his personal net worth is effectively aligned with the thesis that Bitcoin's cryptographic underpinnings will hold.

Shapira's argument centers on the idea that rapidly advancing AI systems could discover weaknesses in SHA-256 hashing or other cryptographic primitives that secure the Bitcoin network. If an AI could efficiently reverse-engineer proof-of-work puzzles or forge transactions, the entire trust model collapses. In practice, Buterin argues, the math doesn't support the fear.