Chamath Palihapitiya Reverses $1 Million Bitcoin (BTC) Call With Zero Price Warning

Billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya now predicts the Bitcoin (BTC) price will fall to zero, arguing that a future artificial intelligence attack will break the network. On episode 304 of the Moonshots podcast hosted by Peter Diamandis, released earlier this week, he said the asset has limited room to grow and will eventually “get hacked and go to zero.” The forecast inverts the position he once held: the same investor branded Bitcoin (BTC) “gold 2.0,” urged savers to treat it as financial insurance and publicly chased a $1 million target. His warning drew immediate attention because it came from one of the asset’s earliest high-profile institutional advocates. His argument rests on three concerns. Fungibility, in his reading, is limited, since a coin’s visible transaction history can make it unattractive to institutions that must account for what they hold. Financial privacy is insufficient, which in his view rules out one class of large buyer outright. He argued central banks cannot adopt the asset as a strategic bitcoin reserve because a fully transparent ledger deprives sovereign institutions of the secrecy their reserves require, and that valuations face a ceiling once that demand is excluded. His darker scenario is more specific. An artificial intelligence system, he said, could crack Bitcoin’s cryptographic defenses or breach the network’s largest dormant whale, the untouched Satoshi Nakamoto holdings. The attacker could then steal those coins, put on a short position through the futures market and publish the breach, profiting twice from the panic that follows. He framed the zero outcome as long-dated rather than imminent, arriving only after a successful attack. Palihapitiya added that a coordinated transition to quantum-resistant cryptography is “basically impossible,” pointing to the governance disputes that have marked the proof-of-work network, where even modest changes have required years of argument among developers, miners and businesses.

The reversal follows a pattern familiar to anyone who has tracked his public statements. Palihapitiya began accumulating between 2012 and 2013, when a single coin cost roughly $80 to $100, and recommended putting 1% of personal wealth into the asset as “fool’s insurance.” By 2017 he saw $100,000 per coin ahead, later raised that target to $1 million, and in January 2021 predicted $200,000 within five to ten years. His selling, however, ran ahead of his rhetoric. In 2014 he spent about 2,739 Bitcoin (BTC), then worth $1.6 million, on a Lake Tahoe property, and in a November 2024 All-In podcast discussion he described those early disposals as “a $3 or $4 billion mistake ... and growing.” He now says he holds no Bitcoin directly, having converted his long-term position into equity of Digital Currency Group, partly to avoid the risks of personal custody. Community members pushed back publicly after the episode circulated, and the criticism spread across Bitcoin market coverage and social feeds alike, aimed less at the technology than at the messenger. The playbook repeats with other assets. In January 2021 he publicly praised Tesla’s prospects and suggested the stock could double or triple; by that September he disclosed he had sold his entire stake over the preceding year while still talking the company up. Then came the blank-check boom. The man nicknamed the “SPAC king” promoted special purpose acquisition companies as a better route to public markets, watched Virgin Galactic, Clover Health and Opendoor collapse while SoFi held up comparatively well, and sold about $213 million of his personal Virgin Galactic stock in early 2021. He later admitted the SPAC incentive structure was “completely and fundamentally misaligned” because he could both sponsor deals and profit from them, and called the episode a stain on his record that he intended to correct.

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Community members pushed back publicly.

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Our read: the zero call is a scenario, not a disclosure. SHA-256 hashing and wallet-signature security are distinct cryptographic layers, and no catastrophic protocol breach has occurred in Bitcoin’s history, which is the fact any attack thesis must first overcome. The messenger weakens the case as much as the mechanics. Palihapitiya sold his coins years ago and swapped the rest for corporate equity, so the forecast carries no direct exposure on either side, and his own record of reversed convictions cuts both ways. The counterweight is already on record: Jordi Visser has dismissed a similar zero-call, on-chain accumulation has continued with whales adding 243,000 BTC since July, and readers weighing the argument against the tape can start from our Bitcoin technical analysis. Where the zero scenario stands or falls is the code itself, and that argument will be settled by cryptographers, not by a forecaster who left the position years ago.