Vitalik: Cybersecurity is inherently defensive, holding cryptocurrency is a bet on this

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin stated that he disagrees with the common view that "AI hackers mean cybersecurity is doomed to fail." He believes that once people clarify their thoughts, cybersecurity naturally leans towards the defensive side, and anyone who continues to hold cryptocurrencies (including himself, with about 90% of his net worth) is implicitly betting on this point.

Vitalik stated: If AI can prove the Navier-Stokes equations and Fermat's Last Theorem, it can also prove "this program is secure" as a mathematical theorem, even if the program is very complex. He used the encrypted communication application Signal as an example to illustrate that the definition of "security" is extremely complex, covering forged messages, active interference, server breaches, key leaks, hardware side channels, and more. The definition is smaller and more composable than the attack surface, and verifying whether the definition is sufficient is more feasible than directly scanning the code.

He pointed out that historically, failures often occur because only the self-identified critical parts of security are verified while neglecting the rest of the code. Today, the entire program must be verified, including the database, network, and cache layers, which modern AI can achieve. This is not a competition to see who discovers vulnerabilities first, but rather to make the code itself more resilient. Vitalik stated that this is the direction for Ethereum in the coming years; without this step, especially for blockchains with scalability and privacy, there is no future. It is necessary to make the software truly secure, and significant progress has already been made.