At the Deconomy 2019 conference in Seoul, South Korea, a public debate took place between the creator of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, and the economist Nouriel Rubini, better known as “Doctor Doom”. The latter is a strong critic of Bitcoin and ideas of financial anonymity. About the details from the scene reported The Block.

“ @Nouriel makes it possible to get cryptocurrency and blockchain applications. Unfortunately, the AT of He looks the crypto Ecosystem on a look-backward basis, The while @VitalikButerin views IT on a look-forward basis. » Https://t.co/gVudwr8a0t

– Mike Dudas (@mdudas) on April 4, 2019

Roubini is convinced that governments will ultimately defeat cryptocurrencies, and the idea of anonymity is not viable. In his opinion, the industry will follow the path of development of Swiss banks, which for a long time were considered the most reliable in terms of confidentiality.

“The reality is that in this area there will be no anonymity. Even in countries like Argentina and Venezuela, where kleptocrats encroach on your capital, they will do everything to ensure that these assets are registered. If they want to tax your cryptocurrency currency or withdraw it, they will do it the same way as the traditional financial system , ”Rubini said.

Completely anonymous cryptocurrencies will not pass, Dr. Doctor Doom summarized.

But Buterin retorted that the question is not whether cryptocurrency will survive in a fight with the state, but that cryptocurrency has formed a new understanding of privacy in society. This, in his opinion, means that states will have to adapt to this vision.

“Even if cryptocurrencies disappear into nowhere, people are already accustomed to having their capital private.”

The creator of Ethereum praised the technology of increased anonymity zk-SNARKs, which is involved in the protocol ZCash.

Nouriel Roubini also criticized the cryptocurrency industry for the appearance of decentralization, and Buterin partially agreed with him.

“You have significant centralization of mining capacities, which is more like oligarchy. You have exchange centralization. You have capital centralization. You also have the centralization of the power of developers. ”

The founder of Ethereum added that he is concerned about the prospect of global expansion of platforms such as Apple Pay, WeChat Pay, or the hypothetical Facebook Pay.

"I can say that sharding is aimed at strengthening decentralization, since fewer transactions will have to be validated."

Nevertheless, Buterin is sure that cryptocurrencies are still under development and mass adoption is waiting for them in the next few years, and then everything will look completely different.

Thus, the rapid development process is still going on, and Roubini speaks about technology as if its standards are already well established.

Earlier, Doctor Doom accused Buterin and the head of ConsenSys startup Joe Lubin of stealing 75% of the ETH proposal during the “premining scam”, which supposedly instantly made them billionaires.

The creator of Ethereum, in response, stated that he never owned more than 0.9% of the volume of supply of the second largest capitalization of cryptocurrency, and the amount of its assets did not approach the $ 1 billion mark.

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