As artificial intelligence makes astounding mathematical breakthroughs, what happens if it cracks Bitcoin’s digital signature system?
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One of Bitcoin’s biggest drawing powers for enthusiasts is security—particularly its decentralized network—meaning there’s no single point of failure that hackers or authorities can target to shut down trading. But a warning from a researcher for the Ethereum Foundation has launched a debate about whether the cryptocurrency is as safe as believed in the age of artificial intelligence.
Justin Drake is the researcher who has set off the debate. In a social media post last week, he called on the blockchain industry “to calmly begin planning for ‘bunker mode’,” saying recent mathematical breakthroughs by AI agents could crack the digital signature scheme that Bitcoin uses.
OpenAI is leading those breakthroughs. Last week, the company released a swath of findings that rocked the mathematics world.
“Recent days have been humbling for human mathematical intuition. Long-held, unquestioned hypotheses have fallen,” Drake wrote on social meda. “[The recent] OpenAI drop made it clear that mathematical superintelligence is upon us. They say there are weeks where decades happen. We are about to live through weeks where centuries of mathematical progress happen. Could our magic 64-byte ECDSA signatures [which protect Bitcoin] be too good to be true? Was it just security through obscurity all this time?”
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To be clear, not everyone agrees with Drake. Isabel Foxen Duke, head of the Mara Foundation, said: “There was a bit of a leap to this conclusion that because we’re solving other math problems with AI, therefore cryptography is at risk. … Nothing in the AI paper led us to believe that widely used protective cryptography was at-risk.”
Yehuda Lindell, head of cryptography at Coinbase and a professor of computer science at Bar-Ilan University, was even more blunt, calling Drake’s post “fear mongering.”
Prior to his warnings about AI, Drake had cautioned the industry about the threats from quantum computing. His post last week signaled a change in thinking that AI could be a bigger concern.