Cryptocurrencies have squandered their early potential, becoming tools for speculation and falling under the control of a few centralized platforms. This conclusion was presented by renowned cryptographer and co-author of the RSA algorithm, Adi Shamir, as reported by The Register.
At the RSA Conference in San Francisco, the 72-year-old programmer noted that Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision for Bitcoin was “very lofty.” However, the promise of creating a decentralized digital money exchange system without government and financial institution intervention has not been fulfilled, according to Shamir.
“Everything is centralized on a few very large exchanges. Nobody uses [Bitcoin] for payments; people use it once to speculate. In my personal opinion, the world would be better off without cryptocurrencies,” he stated.
Shamir’s interlocutor at the panel discussion was Ed Felten, a professor emeritus of computer science at Princeton University and one of the developers of Arbitrum. He compared the crypto industry to the early stages of the internet’s development and noted that technologies can be used in various ways.
“Many people do stupid things, some engage in dangerous and criminal activities. But there are also many people building interesting things — an astonishing number of people, especially in parts of the world where the local government currency is not very secure,” Felten noted.
Shamir agreed that blockchain technology itself is reliable and can have “wonderful applications.” In his view, the problem lies in its use in cryptocurrencies. The situation where anonymous digital assets move around the world without barriers and accountability is “not ideal.”
The scientist added that cryptocurrencies have specifically driven the development of malicious software:
“It would be very difficult to extract so much money from companies if there were no cryptocurrencies.”
In April, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao urged the industry to create AI agents with tokens that would demonstrate “real applicability,” calling most existing examples “useless.”