By Tobi Loba
Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum (ETH), is considering an aspect he sees as the potential and biggest threat to the future of Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and cryptocurrency as a whole.
He made this known in a new interview on the What Bitcoin Did podcast, anchored by the popular Bitcoin proponent, Peter McCormack.
In the course of the interview, Buterin showcased his concern in technical issues and the threat of intervention from authorities, which could directly affect cryptocurrency at large.
In the case of Bitcoin, Buterin cast doubt on continued interest of developers and investors, citing lack of functionality escape velocity.
Regarding the debate on whether Ethereum (ETH) could serve as a new form of money, Buterin pointed out that it depends on the definition of individuals on what currency is all about. He added that the two largest cryptocurrencies, BTC and ETH have already proved they are a store of value.
Vitalik Buterin said:
“So the thing that I tend to worry about — I mean one is that there’s always this kind of black swan risk of technical failure. What if the NSA comes out with a quantum computer out of the blue and just steals a bunch of coins before you can do anything about it?
[There’s also] political failure. So what if governments banned Bitcoin, commandeered the mining pools and use that to do what I call a 51% spawn camping attack – attacking the chain over and over again until it becomes non-viable? And meanwhile, the prices are low because the thing’s banned and there’s a crisis of confidence?”
“Bitcoin doesn’t have what I call functionality escape velocity. So basically, sufficient functionality to serve as a trustless base layer for a lot of different applications. As a result of this, there’s a possibility that over time people will find Bitcoin less and less interesting and other platforms more interesting.”
“The word money does combine together a lot of different concepts. For example, people talk about unit of account, medium of exchange, store of value. For unit of account, ETH is not that and BTC is not that either. For medium of exchange, Bitcoin is used as that and ETH is used as that sometimes… ETH has store of value. That is definitely something that people use ETH for.“
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