Cryptocurrencies have been hyped in Super Bowl ads and promoted by everyone from Bill Clinton to Glenn Greenwald to Spike Lee to Larry David to New York City mayor Eric Adams (who has pledged to turn the city into a “crypto hub”). But times are tough for crypto. As the New York Times reports, “the crypto world [recently] went into a full meltdown… in a sell-off that graphically illustrated the risks of the experimental and unregulated digital currencies.”
One of cryptocurrency’s most vocal skeptics is Nicholas Weaver, senior staff researcher at the International Computer Science Institute and lecturer in the computer science department at UC Berkeley. Weaver has studied cryptocurrencies for years. On today’s episode of the Current Affairs podcast, Prof. Weaver explains why he views the much-hyped technology with such antipathy. He argues that cryptocurrency is useless and destructive, and should “die in a fire.”
Nicholas Weaver’s YouTube lecture on crypto can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9nv0Ol-R5Q&t=30s
Nathan’s take on cryptocurrency is here: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/04/why-cryptocurrency-is-a-giant-fraud and his take on NFTs is here: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/12/are-nfts-the-dumbest-thing-humans-have-ever-done/
A slightly cleaned-up transcript of this interview can be read here: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/05/why-this-computer-scientist-says-all-cryptocurrency-should-die-in-a-fire
This conversation originally aired on the Current Affairs podcast: https://www.patreon.com/CurrentAffairs
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