Buterin Bets Big on Bitcoin's Resilience Against AI Threat

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has revealed that he would be willing to take a bet against an AI-induced crash in Bitcoin's price. In response to angel investor Liron Shapira's claim that Bitcoin prices will plummet by over 50% within the next two years due to AI undermining its security guarantees, Buterin stated that he is 'quite optimistic about cybersecurity in the long term'. He believes that Bitcoin can handle issues not requiring social consensus well and notes that upgrading clients and mining pools to deal with network-layer hacks would be sufficient. However, he did mention that a genuine break of SHA-256 or proof-of-work (PoW) would require a hard fork and social consensus, which he considers 'tiny'. Buterin's comments also touched on the speed at which new cryptographic techniques have been developed, such as succinct proofs (SNARKs) and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), highlighting that 'hard problems are abundant'.

It is worth noting that Buterin's 90% net worth stake in this bet is not a fresh position but rather an existing holding, with most of his assets being Ethereum. His comments on the potential impact of AI on Bitcoin's price have sparked interest and debate within the cryptocurrency community.