via wallstreetonparade:
Two years ago, more than 1,600 computer scientists, software engineers and technologists from around the world sent a letter to U.S. Senate and House Committee Chairs, Ranking Members, and Congressional leaders.
There were 45 signatories that were employed at Google at the time; 19 who worked at Microsoft; 11 employed at Apple. There were signatories that are Ph.Ds from the most prestigious universities in the world, including the University of Oxford and MIT. And all 1,600 signed a letter that says this about crypto and blockchain:
“We strongly disagree with the narrative—peddled by those with a financial stake in the crypto-asset industry—that these technologies represent a positive financial innovation and are in any way suited to solving the financial problems facing ordinary Americans…
“As software engineers and technologists with deep expertise in our fields, we dispute the claims made in recent years about the novelty and potential of blockchain technology. Blockchain technology cannot, and will not, have transaction reversal or data privacy mechanisms because they are antithetical to its base design. Financial technologies that serve the public must always have mechanisms for fraud mitigation and allow a human-in-the-loop to reverse transactions; blockchain permits neither.”
The letter links to an article from Bruce Schneier, a Security Technologist who teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School. The article appeared at Wired on February 6, 2019 under the headline: “There’s No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology.” The article makes the following salient points:
“What blockchain does is shift some of the trust in people and institutions to trust in technology. You need to trust the cryptography, the protocols, the software, the computers and the network. And you need to trust them absolutely, because they’re often single points of failure.
“When that trust turns out to be misplaced, there is no recourse. 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?”
In 2019, Trump Tweeted that “Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies” are “based on thin air” and “can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade….” In 2021, Trump was on Fox Business calling crypto a scam. But all that was before crypto billionaires began plowing big money into his latest campaign for President and he and his family created their own crypto firm, World Liberty Financial. Now Trump is all in on crypto and pledging to make the U.S. the crypto capital of the world.
This past July, Trump delivered a speech at the 2024 Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. At 46 minutes and 10 seconds (46:10) on this CSPAN video of the Trump speech, you can hear Trump say this to the audience:
“America will become the world’s undisputed bitcoin mining powerhouse. You’ll be a bitcoin mining powerhouse. You will not have to move your family to China. We will not be moving to China. As we implement these reforms, Bitcoin and crypto will grow our economy, cement American financial dominance and strengthen our entire country, long into the future….”
Yesterday, consistent with what Trump is doing with other federal agencies, Trump nominated a crypto cheerleader, Paul Atkins, to become Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. And, unlike some of Trump’s other jaw-dropping picks, Atkins has actual prior experience at the SEC, so he will more than likely pass Senate confirmation.
That could make Atkins an extremely dangerous man to U.S. national security interests because crypto mining is adding to the heating of the planet and life-threatening climate change.
In January 2022, Senator Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats in Congress investigated the inherent dangers between crypto, energy usage and the heating of the planet. A press statement summarized their concerns as follows:
“Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency by market cap, and the United States’ share of Bitcoin mining increased from 4% in August 2019 to 35% in July 2021. This share of mining is growing even more rapidly after China’s crackdown on crypto-mining, which left 500,000 mining operations looking for new locations. This could push North America to represent over 40% of the total global computing power dedicated to mining Bitcoin. As more cryptomining operations proliferate in the United States, the extraordinary energy use raises alarms about massive carbon emissions and the impacts of this energy consumption on consumer energy prices. A recent study estimated that cryptomining in upstate New York raised annual electric bills by about $165 million for small businesses and $79 million for consumers.”
According to a report published by the United Nations University and Earth’s Future journal, “during the 2020–2021 period, the global Bitcoin mining network consumed 173.42 Terawatt hours of electricity. This means that if Bitcoin were a country, its energy consumption would have ranked 27th in the world, ahead of a country like Pakistan, with a population of over 230 million people. The resulting carbon footprint was equivalent to that of burning 84 billion pounds of coal or operating 190 natural gas-fired power plants. To offset this footprint, 3.9 billion trees should be planted, covering an area almost equal to the area of the Netherlands, Switzerland, or Denmark or 7% of the Amazon rainforest.”
MORE
80 views