In a recent announcement, a Harvard Cryptographer stated that cryptocurrency is ‘Honestly Useless’
While there is no dearth for cryptocurrency critics including the government officials, a recent statement made by the Harvard cryptographer might force crypto fans to lose their hope in it. Yes, a renowned technology researcher and cryptographer from Harvard University – Bruce Schneier claims that the so-called digital currency is good only for criminal activities or individuals trying to move money without being noticed by the government.
The talk walks through the various aspects quoting how cryptocurrency has failed in its mission to achieve the actual goal as stated in original Whitepaper.
Can we trust a trustless system?
The article written by Schneier, raises concerns on trust issues related to crypto and its underlying technology blockchain. According to him, cryptocurrency was created to provide a basis for electronic transactions without relying on trust, a critical look at the architecture of blockchain technology will show that it cannot function without trust.
Highlighting on how important role the trust plays in dealing with the monetary system or to that matter anything that functions on the public blockchain, he further explains chain of trust issues involved in this technology.
To start with crypto users have to trust that miners are following the right sequences to mine bitcoins then trust that the system won’t crash resulting in a monetary loss. On the same lines he further elaborated that,
If your bitcoin exchange gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If your bitcoin wallet gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If you forget your login credentials, you lose all of your money. If there’s a bug in the code of your smart contract, you lose all of your money. If someone successfully hacks the blockchain security, you lose all of your money.
In many ways, trusting technology is harder than trusting people. Would you rather trust a human legal system or the details of some computer code you don’t have the expertise to audit?
Apart from above mentioned issues, this technology requires huge amount of energy consumption. To which he added that – ‘ you’ve certainly never heard this before – it constitutes a large environmental hazard due to the amount of energy it consumes. ‘
On the ending note, he questions on how meaningful it is to trust a system which is in its has so many loopholes. Is the blockchain shift appropriate for economy or just opt for a system which provide better solutions than breaking the existing trust relationships.
What do you think of Schneier opinion on Cryptocurrency? Do you really think blockchain is useless thing? Let us know in the comment section below.
