Buterin Rejects Prediction That AI Could Crash Bitcoin's Price by Half

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has come to the defense of his network's biggest rival. On Friday on X, he responded to Silicon Valley investor Liron Shapira, who had put the odds at 50 percent that advances in artificial intelligence would break Bitcoin's cryptographic security and trigger a price crash of more than half within the next two years.

Shapira's argument

Shapira, known for pessimistic assessments of AI-related risk, laid out his thesis with a stated confidence level of 50 percent. In his view, rapidly advancing AI could uncover vulnerabilities in the SHA-256 hash function or other cryptographic mechanisms protecting Bitcoin, allowing it to break the proof-of-work puzzle or forge transactions on the network.

Such a scenario, if it came to pass, would strike at the foundation of trust in Bitcoin as an asset whose value rests precisely on the mathematical inviolability of its security. Shapira did not point to a specific attack mechanism, but based his forecast on the pace at which AI models are advancing at breaking computational problems previously considered infeasible.

Buterin's response

Buterin rejected the argument, pointing to a structural asymmetry between attack and defense in cryptography. In his view, breaking encryption requires enormous computational resources, while verifying it is comparatively cheap, giving defenders the advantage even in an era of increasingly powerful AI models.

Breaking encryption is computationally brutal. Verifying encryption is comparably cheap - Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder

The Ethereum co-founder also stressed that SHA-256 has for decades been among the most thoroughly scrutinized cryptographic algorithms in the world. Breaking it would threaten not just Bitcoin but the entire encryption-based infrastructure underpinning everything from banking to military communications and the basic security of the internet.

Why the statement matters

Buterin's remarks carry particular weight because Ethereum has spent years competing with Bitcoin for the position of leading blockchain network, yet its founder is still defending his rival's security. Buterin himself revealed that around 90 percent of his net worth is indirectly tied to the assumption that Bitcoin's cryptographic foundations remain intact, making his stance not just a theoretical statement but also a personal financial bet.

The debate feeds into a broader discussion about whether AI progress will tip the balance of power in cybersecurity toward attackers or defenders. Buterin comes down on the side of defenders, arguing that AI will strengthen both sides in parallel, but that cryptography's structural advantages will remain with security.

What it means for investors

For crypto holders, the dispute has practical stakes, since it touches one of the rarely questioned pillars of Bitcoin's valuation: the belief that its security cannot be broken by available computing power. Public doubts from a recognizable figure in the AI world can stoke uncertainty, even though Shapira himself assigned his thesis only 50 percent confidence rather than certainty.

The exchange also shows that crypto industry leaders increasingly have to address AI-related risks head-on rather than treating them as distant science fiction. As AI models gain capabilities in areas like breaking security systems and code analysis, questions about the resilience of cryptographic systems to these advances will keep coming up, including for other blockchain networks.

For now, neither side has presented hard empirical evidence beyond probability estimates, meaning the dispute remains at the level of risk assessment rather than a confirmed technical threat.