Balaji Srinivasan: prediction

Transcript context

…Let’s turn to cryptocurrency for a bit, an area you know something about. Which of the arguments against the future viability of crypto assets do you find most persuasive, granted that you’re not agreeing with them? What’s the best criticism? If someone says, “Oh, cryptocurrencies in 15 years, it won’t be a thing,” what’s the best argument for that point of view? That the decentralization model actually doesn’t work and that it’s actually possible to compromise the underlying blockchains. Last year, I had an article called “Quantifying Decentralization,” which put forth a metric for how decentralized a given coin is. The idea is that it could be decentralized in terms of how many miners you’d need to compromise to control it or how many developers or how many exchanges or what have you. And the minimum number of entities that you needed to compromise was the degree of decentralization of the system. The utility of that — I’m not saying it’s a perfect metric; it’s imperfect like all metrics — but the utility of that is that you could start to rank order coins by their at least purported level of decentralization. I think insofar as these blockchains fail, it would be because the decentralization models were not robust enough to protect against the attacks they’re supposed to protect against. Will libertarians eventually turn on Bitcoin as some commentators have predicted?…

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