Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t understand Bitcoin – that’s a shame
Tim Berners-Lee slammed digital currency speculation on an episode of CNBC’s “Beyond the Valley” podcast late last week.
The inventor of the World Wide Web called digital currencies “merely speculative” and compared them to the Dot Com bubble. Speaking about the nature of the speculation frenzy in recent years, he said, “of course it’s very dangerous. It is if you want to get a kick out of gambling, really.”
Berners-Lee said that investing in purely speculative assets is not where he would spend his time. However, he saw a use case for digital currencies – remittances – on the condition that they are immediately converted back to fiat currencies when received.
Berners-Lee has often expressed dissatisfaction with how the web turned out. When asked about his opinion on Web 3.0, he said that it would not be based on blockchain technology because it is not fast or secure enough.
Berners-Lee should talk to Dr. Craig Wright
When I hear a man of this caliber express an ill-informed opinion that blockchain is not fast or secure enough to support the Internet of the future, I am horrified. Really, the damage “crypto bros” have done to the image of digital currencies and blockchain technology is almost irreparable.
In fact, many of Berners-Lee’s concerns about the web and how it has turned out can be addressed specifically by Satoshi Nakamoto’s original Bitcoin protocol. Why? Mainly because its inventor, Dr. Craig Wright, shares many of the same concerns as Berners-Lee, and he sought to address them by inventing Bitcoin.
The inventor of the web, like the inventor of Bitcoin, has expressed distaste for Silicon Valley companies and their “move fast and break things” philosophy. Although he had a powerful vision that the web would positively transform governments, businesses and entire societies, it has torn all three apart. Coups orchestrated on Facebook (NASDAQ: META ), parasitic privacy-invading companies that harvest data and monitor our every move, and communities falling apart thanks to echo chambers and political polarization are the norm in the Internet age.
Berners-Lee told a Vanity Fair reporter in Washington that he was “devastated” at what his invention had become. However, his remarks that blockchain is not fast or secure enough to underpin a new, transformed global network show that he does not fully understand it. That’s not a surprise, nor is it a slight to the genius who pioneered the web; Vested interests such as the Digital Currency Group have ensured that even the most intelligent and forward-looking people in the world do not understand what Bitcoin is and is capable of.
So, what is Bitcoin?
Far from being a purely speculative digital currency, Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system that can perform unlimited transactions per second. To understand this, it is necessary to first understand that BTC is not Bitcoin – it is a protocol fork that uses the Bitcoin name, and is actually just a speculative, useless waste of resources.
However, the real Bitcoin, the protocol Dr. Wright invented, could radically transform how the internet, and thus the web, works. By making transactions peer-to-peer (in the context of IPv6), intermediaries such as Meta and Twitter could be cut out, stopping their data collection as peer-to-peer communications facilitated by nanotransactions replace them.
Similarly, the tsunami of criminal activity unleashed by the web, including everything from doorstep drug dealing to the proliferation of endless scams and financial ripoffs, can be significantly reduced by the time-stamped evidence of every transaction left on the blockchain. Yes, privacy can be maintained, but when serious crimes occur, there will be proof on the blockchain that it did, and thus there will be less incentive to commit those crimes in the first place.
As for whether or not Bitcoin can scale to underpin the future of the internet, it’s simple; it can already process 100,000 transactions per second, and since there is no theoretical limit to block sizes, it can handle unlimited transactions. In terms of security, the proof-of-work miners who will compete for blocks with billions of microtransactions in them will ensure that the network is secure.
Tim Berners-Lee, like so many others, does not understand Bitcoin (yet). It’s not his fault. A chat with the inventor would quickly bring him up to speed!
See: IPv6 is just like the original Bitcoin – both are about scaling
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