Andreas Antonopoulos told conference members that “Bitcoin is the future and Blockchain is bullshit” days before the now-infamous Consensus 2018, it has emerged.
Antonopoulos Champions Essential ‘Weirdness’
Speaking at the Polish Bitcoin Congress in Warsaw May 12, Antonopoulos, who has been a well-known Bitcoin advocate and educator since 2013, argued that Bitcoin’s “weirdness” and decentralization’s ability to “offend” were key to its success.
“…The reason Bitcoin is interesting is because it’s not controlled, because it can’t be censored, because it’s open, because a lot of the people involved are very, very weird,” he said.
[…] If you take all that out, what you’re left with – this Blockchain – is a sterile, unexpressive (sic), uninvented environment; a corporate plaything that has been sanitized of every interesting and left as an empty shell.
Blockchain Is ‘Basically A Very Slow Database’
The views are commonplace for Antonopoulos, who has sought to reinforce the revolutionary qualities behind Bitcoin and other decentralized networks on countless occasions.
The Polish talk’s timing, however, was pertinent, as Consensus caused controversy just four days later after other Bitcoin industry figures criticized its Blockchain bias and lack of technical substance.
Bitcoin developers Jimmy Song and Johnathan Corgan specifically highlighted the event’s perceived shortcomings, arguing Blockchain had become a victim of “cargo cult engineering” and that a lack of education on the part of audience members prevented them from sorting valuable information from “buzzwords.”
“It’s basically a very slow database,” Antonopoulos continued in comments on Blockchain which Song would later emulate.
If someone comes to you and says, ‘Do I need a blockchain for my business?’ Ask them, ‘Do you need something that is open, neutral, borderless, that no one controls and that resists censorship?’ If yes, then you need Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero, ZCash – some open public Blockchain… that expresses these capabilities.
Beyond Bitcoin, Antonopoulos also had cautionary words for banks looking to Ethereum for Blockchain solutions.
“Right now, the big banks, governments – they’re in love with Ethereum. They love the fact that Ethereum has all of these capabilities that seem much, much less weird than Bitcoin,” he continued.
But they don’t realize that all of the weirdness is still there[…]. The whole point of Ethereum is to make unstoppable code, applications you cannot turn off – and the reason they can’t be turned off is because they’re decentralized apps – DApps. Why make a DApp unless you wanted to make a DApp that somebody wants to turn off and you want to continue working?
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