Vitalik Buterin backs crypto ‘bunker mode’ amid rapid AI math advances

Crypto's greatest weakness has always been security. Even if the algorithms themselves hold, humans need to keep their keys safe. We have decades of experience now showing that humans can't do that.

I wouldn't be worrying about the algorithms so much as I'd worry about all of the end-users who are going to get their keys stolen and their wallets drained thanks to the deluge of new vulnerabilities in operating systems, browsers, wallets, personal agents and other software.

I'm a bit concerned about starting a flame war, but I barely follow any cryptocurrency news at all. So I am curious: would there actually be any negative macro consequence if this were to happen?

I know, at the micro level some people would lose their money, but does bitcoin (or any cryptocurrency) have any practical, legitimate use with visible impact on the global economy (or even the national eonomy of any country with major footprint)? And I'd be sad for some of those people. but would it have any impact that I would notice? My money is in broad, boring index funds.

The guy that made the 'bunker mode' tweet is an Ethereum guy, the chain that they reorganized when the wrong people lost money in the DAO hack.

What good are strong cryptography primitives for cryptocurrency if your "CEO" can successfully make calls to reorganize the chain?

My gut is telling me pushing security model to hashes seems like a far far worse bet if you are worried about advances in maths.

May be Ethereum should fund 10000 agents to pursue new crypto math with provable strongness/hardness

FWIW, there has already been a lot of effort thrown at AI attacking lattice problems underlying PQC without anything to show for it. I'm not sure why Vitalik is suddenly worried about lattice problems in particular, unless he has some insider knowledge.

Why should we believe that LLMs are going to break ECC?

It’s always tragic when the new hype train runs over the old one. It pains my soul to imagine those gentle folks with millions in crypto being subjected to the incredibly foreseeable consequences of their limitless greed.

It may be a plausible concern at some point in the future but, once it's possible, it would manifest as an extremely expensive and time consuming attack against a targeted address, it would require an enormous amount of compute. So, I suppose the first line of defense would be to never keep more funds locked under one key than it would cost an attacker to decrypt it.