Vitalik Buterin believes that technical security challenges can be resolved through simple client and mining pool updates. He argues that network-layer threats do not require social consensus or community coordination to be addressed.
The Ethereum co-founder responded to concerns that AI could cause Bitcoin's value to drop by more than 50% over the next two years. Buterin described the probability of breaking Bitcoin's core cryptography, including its hashes and proof-of-work model, as tiny.
Bitcoin's proof-of-work system has accumulated approximately 2^96 hashes over its lifetime. This computational weight makes a successful attack physically impossible with current resources.
The network has never experienced a successful 51% attack. Buterin also noted that while elliptic-curve cryptography is robust today, it could theoretically be vulnerable to future quantum computers, though current systems are not yet at that scale.
