Crypto legend says the "world would have been better without cryptocurrencies."
The early promise of cryptocurrency has been wasted, and the promise of becoming a decentralised way to exchange money digitally without government interference, or reliance on financial institutions, hasn't come through.
Speaking at RSA Conference’s Cryptographer’s Panel, Adi Shamir said Satoshi Nakamoto's paper [PDF] on Bitcoin and its blockchain was "very lofty.” According to The Register, Shamir said everything is highly centralised in a small number of very large exchanges, and “no one is using it in order to make payments; people are using it once in order to speculate."
“So my personal opinion is that the world would have been better without cryptocurrencies,” he said, pointing out that cryptocurrencies have enabled all the malware, and it would “have been very difficult to extract so much money from companies if there were no cryptocurrencies."
In response, Ed Felten, Professor Emeritus of computer science at Princeton University, admitted that things aren't as easy as Nakamoto may have envisioned and a shift to a decentralised currency is massively complicated, but it's very early days and major societal institutions are still working out the ground rules.
“In a lot of ways, it reminds me of the early internet," Felten said: “There are a lot of people doing silly things, some people doing dangerous and criminal things, but there's a lot of people building interesting things, a surprising number of people, especially in parts of the world where the local government issue currency is not very safe."
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Dan Raywood is a B2B journalist with 25 years of experience, including covering cybersecurity for the past 17 years. He has extensively covered topics from Advanced Persistent Threats and nation-state hackers to major data breaches and regulatory changes.
He has spoken at events including 44CON, Infosecurity Europe, RANT Forum, BSides Scotland, Steelcon and the National Cyber Security Show, and served as editor of SC Media UK, Infosecurity Magazine and IT Security Guru. He was also an analyst with 451 Research and a product marketing lead at Tenable.
