Bitcoin overview: Bitcoin is hopelessly useless - Bruce Schneier, Harvard University
|- Harvard professor criticizes the cryptocurrency as being totally meaningless.
- BTC/USD is under pressure amid profit-taking.
Bitcoin is hovering around $3,600 handle, down 1.5% since the start of the day. The first digital asset retraced from the recent high of $3,707 late on Friday as speculative traders have been taking profits after a strong rally.
Meanwhile, the technology researcher and professor of Harvard University Bruce Schneier said that Bitcoin is attractive only to a small group of people who need to move money around without being noticed by the governments. Otherwise, the cryptocurrency is “hopelessly useless.”
To support his point of view he used well-known arguments. He said that Bitcoin was envisaged as a peer-to-peer payment system, but it failed to deliver on its primary premise, which rendered it useless and operationally defunct.
The expert emphasized that the safety and presumed trustlessness of the system are illusory.
“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?” he said.
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