Buterin vs. Shapira: Ethereum Co-Founder Disagrees with AI-Related Bitcoin Price Crash Prediction
Bitcoin faces the risk of a 50% price crash in the next two years due to AI-related attacks, according to entrepreneur and AI-risk commentator Liron Shapira. He assigns a 50% probability to this outcome, claiming that Bitcoin's security guarantees could be undermined by increasingly capable AI systems.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin disagrees, saying he remains optimistic about cybersecurity in the long term. He believes that Bitcoin should be able to respond smoothly to vulnerabilities that don't require changes to the network's social consensus.
Buterin notes that advanced models could discover ordinary software vulnerabilities in node implementations, wallets, mining infrastructure, exchanges, or libraries surrounding the Bitcoin ecosystem. This concern has grown substantially in 2026, with over three dozen Bitcoin and cryptocurrency companies urging leading AI developers to give security researchers better access to powerful frontier models.
Buterin also thinks that the probability of an actual break affecting Bitcoin's hashing system or proof-of-work mechanism is extremely small. He even joked that he had little need to formally wager against Shapira, as 90% of his net worth is already invested in cryptocurrencies.