Media
Jon von Tetzchner – the CEO of Vivaldi – has put out a blog post that doesn’t place cryptocurrency in the greatest light. In the blog, he suggests digital currency is nothing more than a “Ponzi scheme” posing as currency.
Jon von Tetzchner Isn’t a Crypto Fan
He writes the following:
Cryptocurrency has been touted by many as a revolution in currency, the future of investment, and a breakthrough technology, but if you look beyond the hype, you’ll find nothing more than a pyramid scheme posing as currency.
Tetzchner was also quick to criticize how crypto is sold to investors. He writes:
Since cryptocurrency is too volatile to be used as actual currency, people treat it as a sort of investment scheme. The problem is that to extract actual money from the system you need to find someone willing to buy the tokens you are holding, and this is only likely to happen so long as they believe they will be able to sell them on to someone who’ll pay even more for them, and so on, and so on. If, at any point, one stops being able to find people willing to buy those tokens on just the promise of them being worth more in the future, the whole scheme might well come crashing down, with the value of all tokens going to zero.
He is also very outspoken in the blog about the amount of energy bitcoin and crypto mining uses:
The energy usage of bitcoin alone is staggering, consuming as much electricity as some countries, and this is likely to keep increasing as the technology behind it does not and cannot scale in any reasonable way. While so many of us are trying our best to reduce our carbon footprints, it feels counterproductive to indulge in technology that undoes that hard work.
This is something that we have heard echoing across the crypto tundra time and time again. Many environmentalists are concerned about where the planet’s future lies if people continue to put all their faith, time, and money into extracting digital currency units.
Even high-profile industry officials have revealed their concern in the past. A big example comes in the form of Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, who initially decided that his electric car company would accept BTC as a form of payment for items. However, this was quickly rescinded given that he felt worried about how much energy is used to mine bitcoin and how little miners are allegedly doing to control emissions.
His Company Will Never Be for It
Tetzchner further stated that there is no chance his company will ever support crypto in the future. He explains:
By creating our own cryptocurrency or supporting cryptocurrency-related features in the browser, we would be helping our users to participate in what is at best, a gamble, and at worst, a scam. It would be unethical; plain and simple.