Vitalik: Cyber Defense May Eventually Prevail, but Transition Will Be Hard

TREE NEWS update: Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said on X that he has not predicted and will not predict that cyber defense will automatically outpace attack capabilities. He expects defenders may eventually gain the upper hand, but the transition will be difficult, requiring deeper methodological shifts such as formal verification and proactively minimizing the trusted computing base (TCB), work that remains at an early stage. He cited this as a key reason for supporting slowing or pausing related technological development and argued more than 1% of GDP should go to cybersecurity, biosecurity and physical-world safety.