Keep calm and enter 'bunker mode,' crypto bros say

Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin said on X that crypto wallets need to become more secure in light of AI-accelerated breakthroughs in mathematics.<p class="copyright">MARCOS BRINDICCI/AFP via Getty Images</p>

Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin said on X that crypto wallets need to become more secure in light of AI-accelerated breakthroughs in mathematics.

MARCOS BRINDICCI/AFP via Getty Images

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  • Truman Dickerson

Crypto bros are warning that AI-accelerated math could compromise wallet security, a day after OpenAI said its models drove new results.

  • Crypto bros are warning that AI-accelerated math could compromise wallet security.
  • OpenAI on Tuesday published new AI-driven results related to previously unsolved equations.
  • A researcher at Ethereum advised people to enter "bunker mode," sparking a wider conversation across the industry.

The crypto bros are worried AI could come for their blockchain wallets.

The crypto-clutching began when Justin Drake, a researcher at the blockchain platform Ethereum, said on X on Wednesday that people holding the digital currency should plan to enter "bunker mode" by moving their funds to fresh addresses.

Drake cited the proclivity of OpenAI models to solve thought-to-be-impossible math problems — a development he said hackers might one day use to derive private keys from public keys of blockchain wallets, which are usually protected by mathematical computation.

"Yesterday's OpenAI drop made it clear that mathematical superintelligence is upon us," Drake said in reference to the ChatGPT maker releasing hundreds of new AI-driven mathematical results on Tuesday.

"Today I call upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for 'bunker mode,'" he added.

Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin took a more cautious approach. Buterin said on X that people shouldn't "scramble to move their funds to new wallets today."

He did say, however, that the crypto industry needs to find a more robust way to encrypt private keys.

"We should take the risks to cryptography from AI-accelerated math seriously," Buterin said.

Bitcoin transactions, along with those of other currencies, are secured with cryptography, a coding system in which transactions are encrypted with public keys and access to bitcoin itself is controlled by a private key.

It would take supercomputers "trillions of years" to derive a private key from a public one, given how complex the computations are, a Wall Street analyst said this year.

Drake suggested that AI, on the other hand, could be used to find a workaround in as little as one week.

Other crypto researchers said that Drake is jumping the gun with his warnings, and that AI won't be able to break encryption anytime soon.

"We have simply gone from 'AI produced surprising mathematics' to 'therefore perhaps ECDSA collapses within months,'" Chris Seedor, a German crypto entrepreneur, said on X, referring to a popular encryption system.

Crypto bros were previously worried about quantum computers cracking private keys. Drake said that, in his view, AI is now poised to overtake quantum computers as the primary threat to encryption.

"Recent days have been humbling for human mathematical intuition," he said. "Long-held, unquestioned hypotheses have fallen."

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