"Bitcoin will drop to zero". Billionaire believes Satoshi's wallets will be emptied, and the hacker will profit double

Billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya, founder of Social Capital, former Facebook manager, and co-host of the All-In podcast, claims that Bitcoin will eventually be hacked and its price will drop to zero. In an episode of Peter Diamandis' Moonshots podcast, Chamath envisions a scenario where 'someone' targets cryptocurrencies using artificial intelligence, and the most tempting prize is the coins of Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin. The attacker would empty the wallet and then profit from a short position.

Chamath Palihapitiya predicts Bitcoin's downfall

Palihapitiya breaks down his thesis into three stages.

First: stagnation. Every BTC coin can be traced in a public transaction ledger, so Bitcoin lacks fungibility and privacy. This, in his opinion, deters central banks, and without them, the price will not rise.

Next: attack. Self-improving AI models would eventually break the security based on the SHA-256 function and open Satoshi's wallet. The thief would profit doubly: first from the tokens themselves (which is obvious), and second from the panic that would erupt in the market immediately after the breach is announced, manipulating the market for a short position.

Stage three: helplessness. Transitioning to quantum-resistant cryptography, the billionaire called "virtually impossible," as the Bitcoin community cannot even agree on basic issues.

The above scenario comes from a man who aggressively bought Bitcoin in 2012-2013 for $80-$100 and urged to hold 1% of one's wealth in it as insurance in case skeptics were wrong. In January 2021, he predicted on CNBC that the price would reach $200,000.

However, he disposed of part of his coins early. In 2014, he paid about 2739 BTC worth $1.6 million at the time for a plot by Lake Tahoe. In November 2024, he admitted that selling his Bitcoins was a serious mistake that cost him a fortune. He exchanged the remaining ones for shares in Digital Currency Group (DCG), the parent company of Grayscale. Chart and current BTC price, source: Coingecko and TradingView, reading: 03.11.2026, 20:33

The billionaire confused the locks. However, the problem with the keys exists

Satoshi's coins are not protected by SHA-256. The decision of who can spend Bitcoin is determined by a digital signature on the elliptic curve secp256k1, i.e., the ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm). Satoshi held most of his 1.1 million bitcoins in the oldest P2PK (pay-to-public-key) format, where the public key has been visible on the blockchain since 2009. Deriving the private key from it is potentially a task for a powerful quantum computer with Shor's algorithm, not for a language model/AI. While AI helps to find errors in cryptographic implementations, no model has yet broken the mathematics of elliptic curves.

On March 31, 2026, the Google Quantum AI team calculated in a special report on threats to cryptocurrencies that to break 256-bit elliptic curve cryptography, a machine with less than 500,000 physical qubits would suffice, about twenty times less than previously estimated. The calculation would take minutes. The catch is that no one has built such a machine yet, and the largest quantum processors have "only" about a thousand qubits.

Glassnode calculated in May that 6.04 million BTC, or 30.2% of the supply, lies on addresses with revealed public keys. Of this pool, 1.92 million are exposed due to the address format itself, and 4.12 million due to the repeated use of the same addresses. Exchanges alone account for 1.66 million BTC from this second group.

Bitcoin developers are preparing a shield

On February 11, a proposal BIP-360 (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) was added to the official repository. It introduces a type of P2MR (pay-to-Merkle-root) address that does not reveal the public key, but there is no date for its implementation on the main network. Developer Jameson Lopp, along with five co-authors, went even further and described in the draft BIP-361 a plan to phase out old signatures. About three years after activation, the network would only accept transfers to addresses resistant to quantum computers, and in the next phase, unspent coins, including those of Satoshi, would become unspendable. Adam Back, head of Blockstream (and one of the people suspected of being behind the figure of Satoshi Nakamoto), is against it because forced freezing contradicts the promise that Bitcoin cannot be taken away from anyone.

For now, the largest thefts have nothing to do with qubits. From the largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance, cryptocurrencies worth about $6.3 billion were withdrawn at the end of October, and four days later, at least $40 million disappeared from the Brazilian exchange Mercado Bitcoin. In both cases, the money flowed out of the exchanges' own wallets. The Bitcoin protocol has been running continuously since January 2009, and no one has broken it yet.

Hackers do not need to wait for a quantum computer. They just need someone to neglect the keys.

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