Nicholas Weaver – senior staff researcher at the International Computer Science Institute – stated in a recent interview that he thinks bitcoin and crypto should “die in a fire.” Clearly, he’s no fan of the space.
Nicholas Weaver Wants to Do Away with Crypto Permanently
During the interview, he referred to El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele – who recently tied his entire country’s economy and payment systems to bitcoin – as a “totalitarian nutcase,” and said that the crypto arena doesn’t bring anything solid or noteworthy to the financial world. He commented:
The cryptocurrency space itself has the object permanence of a horny mayfly. It’s time to really think about burning it down. Now, I just want to take the entire cryptocurrency space and throw it into the sun.
One of the big problems he has with bitcoin is that in his mind, it doesn’t work well as a payment system. To an extent, we can see where this argument is coming from given that bitcoin was initially designed to serve as a payment tool. However, that’s been a slow journey given the currency’s ongoing volatility. He said:
Bitcoin burns that much of the world’s electricity to be able to process somewhere between three to seven transactions per second across the entire world.
To be fair, however, while paying with bitcoin isn’t necessarily the norm at the time of writing, there are a lot more companies and businesses out there now willing to accept crypto as a method of payment.
He further commented that aside from the volatility, bitcoin is a poor choice given that it is slow compared to other transaction methods. He is also concerned because if bitcoin is taken or sent to a wrong address, it usually can’t be gotten back.
In the long run, Weaver feels that bitcoin and its digital currency counterparts only serve criminals and those looking to take part in illicit activity. He commented:
And so, what is it good for? Well, there are classes of payments that the intermediaries don’t allow. The big ones are drug dealing, child sexual abuse material, and ransoms. The cryptocurrency used for payments is only used seriously for ransomware payments, where companies need to pay $10 million. Drug deals (drug dealers hate it, but it’s the only game in town, and we’ve had cases of websites selling child exploitation material paid with bitcoin.
It Uses Too Much Energy!
In addition, Weaver is also very worried about how much energy is required to mine bitcoin. He commented that the space utilizes more electricity than any other, stating:
The biggest [excuse crypto enthusiasts make for bitcoin] is ‘this incentivizes green power,’ which it does in the same way that a whole bunch of random shootings would incentivize bulletproof vests.
In the end, he feels BTC is a big Ponzi scheme.