Strategy founder Michael Saylor has rejected the argument that advances in artificial intelligence could make owning Bitcoin pointless, weighing in on the debate in a post on his X account.

Saylor objected to the direct link being drawn between crypto applications being vulnerable to attacks and the claim that owning Bitcoin loses its meaning. According to his analogy, giving up Bitcoin because a cryptocurrency app can be attacked follows the same logic as giving up speaking English because AI can hack a messaging app.

The post opened up a broader discussion on whether security issues at the application level should be treated under the same heading as the Bitcoin network and the asset itself.

Where the risk actually sits

At the heart of the debate is the fact that artificial intelligence makes it easier for attackers to find and exploit software vulnerabilities. A vulnerability in an exchange interface, a wallet application, or another service has different consequences than a breach of Bitcoin's underlying protocol — a network that has operated continuously since its 2009 launch. In practice, a flaw in a single service can be patched or taken offline without touching the network itself, which is why application incidents and protocol questions are usually assessed as separate categories of risk — a distinction that shapes how far conclusions about the asset are drawn.

Held echoes Saylor

Bitcoin investor Dan Held expressed a similar view in his response to the post. Held argued that the possibility of AI-driven attacks is not unique to the crypto sector, and that other digital systems face the same risk. The exchange points to what matters most as AI capabilities advance across the software industry: how security incidents are attributed — to individual services or to the underlying networks — and how directly conclusions about Bitcoin itself follow from them.

Background

Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy, is the enterprise software company Saylor co-founded in 1989. It began purchasing Bitcoin in 2020 and has since become the largest corporate holder of the asset, with Saylor serving as one of the cryptocurrency's most prominent corporate advocates.

*This is not investment advice.