[DigitalToday reporter Choo Hyun-woo] Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong (브라이언 암스트롱) directly rejected claims that the AI boom could bring down bitcoin.

On July 20 local time, blockchain outlet U.Today reported that Armstrong said the bitcoin network would operate normally through automatic difficulty adjustment even if miners move into the AI computing market. He said the price is driven not by miners' electricity costs but by inflation concerns.

The remarks were a rebuttal to a claim by billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya (차마스 팔리하피티야). Palihapitiya predicted a structural crisis could hit cryptocurrencies if miners moved en masse to AI because AI computing profitability is 10 to 20 times higher than bitcoin mining.

Armstrong said such calculations overlook bitcoin’s core mechanism. He said the energy cost of bitcoin mining does not determine its market value.

Armstrong pointed to bitcoin’s automatic difficulty adjustment. He said that even if half of miners immediately shift to AI work, the network lowers computational difficulty to keep block creation times unchanged. In that case, the system operates normally and mining becomes more accessible for remaining miners, he said.

Armstrong cited global inflation concerns, not electricity costs, as the real driver of bitcoin’s price. He said demand for a scarce digital asset remains regardless of how much power is used for mining if governments expand fiscal deficits and continue to increase the money supply.

The discussion follows Armstrong’s market assessment from a month ago. When the market fell locally in mid-June, he urged investors to look at the bigger picture and released bitcoin’s four-year cycle chart. At the time, he said price rises and falls were a natural 흐름 driven by the asset’s structural mechanism.

Armstrong said then the situation was neither as good nor as bad as it looked and that he remained more bullish than ever. He also suggested that a cyclical bottom in bitcoin’s price had already formed around $60,000.