ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood publicly rejected a podcaster's description of Bitcoin as a "dead cat," calling it one of her many lives ahead instead. The exchange followed a post showing Bitcoin's one-year chart down 30%, a day after Wood joined a separate ARK podcast episode on artificial intelligence and Bitcoin security.
Calacanis calls Bitcoin a bouncing dead cat
Jason Calacanis, host of the podcast "This Week in Startups," posted Bitcoin's one-year price chart showing a 30% drop on Sep. 18. He called the cryptocurrency a "dead cat" that keeps bouncing.
Calacanis argued that Bitcoin has existed for 17 years but still isn't used for transactions and remains "intimidating" for most people. He added that institutionalization has turned it from punk rock into background music — a store of value that he called boring. If Bitcoin were headed for mass adoption with a use case, he said, it would have gotten there by now.
Wood says Bitcoin has many lives ahead
Wood, among the most vocal Bitcoin proponents, pushed back on the podcaster's comments. According to TheStreet: "Bitcoin is not a dead cat, Jason! It has many lives ahead."
Wood is one of the earliest institutional investors in Bitcoin, and she has said ARK Invest was the first public asset manager to gain Bitcoin exposure in 2015, when the price hadn't yet touched $500. She also pointed to ARK's Sep. 17 "Bitcoin Brainstorm" podcast episode focused on the convergence of AI and Bitcoin.
ARK's research eases quantum computing fears
That episode brought together Wood, ARK digital assets research director Lorenzo Valente, Bitcoin Park founder Rod Roudi, AnchorWatch co-founder and CEO Rob Hamilton, Cake Wallet and Radar COO Seth for Privacy, and Unchained co-founder and CSO Dhruv Bansal. They discussed how rapidly advancing AI models are changing Bitcoin security, including the growing availability of open-weight models whose trained parameters are released publicly for anyone to download, run, and fine-tune.
Wood said combining domain expertise with AI is unbeatable, since coders are willing to work with AI to find system vulnerabilities. Attackers are certainly using AI to break into systems, she said, but defenders can use the same technology to harden them.
She admitted it was unsettling to watch Bitcoin whale movements as an investor amid the threat of quantum computing, but said ARK's own research has eased those concerns.
Source: TheStreet
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