Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder and core developer of the Ethereum protocol, has spoken out on the compulsory Bitcoin adoption policy mandated by the El Salvador government on its constituents.
According to Buterin, the move was “reckless” in that it did not account for prior education of the prospective users. Critics of the El Salvador Bitcoin law, to which Buterin now joins ranks, have pointed out these same contentions, aside from the fact that the law only glaringly prioritized one cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, over a slew of other cryptocurrencies that may have more developed functionalities and integrations, such as smart contracts and decentralized finance.
Buterin’s criticisms were leveled from a comment to a Reddit thread, in which the Ethereum co-founder said that the move “risks a large number of innocent people getting hacked or scammed.”
Buterin further argued that because it only prioritized Bitcoin, the law, as implemented in El Salvador, ran “contrary to the ideals of freedom that are supposed to be so important to the crypto community.”
Buterin also further singled out “Bitcoin maximalists” as the ones “responsible” for creating hype and uncritical reception of the Bitcoin law’s implementation, saying that the crypto community should be more vigilant about such a large-scale, and possibly highly impactful law. Early on, the Bitcoin law was faced with criticism not just from the crypto community, but also from El Salvador citizens themselves, who took to the streets to protest against the law.
The law has since been the subject of intense criticism due to the El Salvador government’s authoritarian tendency, which essentially ran counter to the libertarian slant of Bitcoin, and by extension, cryptocurrency’s spirit.
El Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele has likewise been criticized for the strongarm tactics that were used to push this specific agenda, with Bukele even going on to his Twitter bio to call himself the “the coolest dictator in the world world” who has ushered in the new policy.
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