Vitalik Buterin bets 90% of net worth against AI Bitcoin crash

Vitalik Buterin said he is betting roughly 90 percent of his net worth against a forecast that AI will halve Bitcoin's price in two years.

"I take the opposite side of that," the Ethereum co-founder said Sept. 7 on X, answering angel investor Liron Shapira, who gave 50 percent odds that AI breaks Bitcoin's security and sends the token down more than half by 2028.

Buterin split the risk into two buckets. Client-software bugs and mining-pool infrastructure can be patched by developers and node operators without changing Bitcoin's rules, he argued, while a genuine break of SHA-256 or proof-of-work — a scenario requiring a hard fork and social consensus — carries only "tiny" probability. Bitcoin traded near $80,000 on Sept. 6 after touching a three-month high of $82,239 on Sept. 3, so Shapira's call needs a print under $40,000.

The exchange carries weight beyond the two men because Buterin, founder of Bitcoin's largest rival network, is not a maximalist defending his own bags. Wallets holding 100 or more Bitcoin added about 60,000 tokens in August, roughly matching what smaller holders sold, CryptoQuant data shows — large investors are not braced for a crash.

Shapira's thesis is as much about perception as code. His phrasing targeted "what people imagined were" Bitcoin's guarantees, meaning the market could re-price the token on fear of an AI-found flaw before any flaw is exploited. On that reading, a 50 percent drawdown needs only a loss of confidence, not a broken hash function.

Buterin's answer was an engineer's. In a separate thread the same night he pointed to the pace of advances in succinct proofs and fully homomorphic encryption "particularly in 2026," arguing that "hard problems are abundant" and cryptography keeps finding new footing as old assumptions erode. Ethereum's own roadmap, overhauled Aug. 10, moved quantum safety to the top of the list for the same reason.

The "90 percent" is not a fresh position but a statement that his existing holdings, most of them ETH, already lose if AI breaks the cryptographic assumptions both networks share. His parenthetical to Shapira — "I assume you believe the same re ETH" — makes the point that a hash-level attack would not stop at Bitcoin.

Shapira is not alone in warning about AI's effect on crypto. BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes has said rapid AI growth could pull money away from digital assets and that an AI-driven credit shock could push Bitcoin below $60,000. Bitcoin critic Peter Schiff wrote that "AI isn't bullish for Bitcoin; it's a threat to it," arguing the two compete for investment money, electricity, and data-center capacity.

For markets, the debate lands as Bitcoin presses against resistance. The token stalled below an $80,335-to-$82,239 band over the weekend, and a break above that range needs fresh demand that August whale accumulation has yet to confirm. Buterin's public confidence in the network's cryptography gives bulls a high-profile counterweight to the AI-crash narrative heading into the fourth quarter.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.