Vitalik Buterin has criticized El Salvador’s methods for adopting Bitcoin as legal tender, arguing against one of the biggest crypto adoption milestones to date.
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Buterin went after crypto advocates who praised Nayib Bukele in a Reddit thread. El Salvador’s authoritarian president, Bukele, is widely criticized for efforts to undermine the nation’s democratic institutions.
El Salvador became the first country to accept Bitcoin as legal tender on September 7 – the same day as the cryptocurrency market crashed.
Problems with Bitcoin adoption as described by Vitalik Buterin
In the Ethereum founder’s opinion, El Salvador’s adoption of Bitcoin undermined freedom by forcing businesses to accept it.
“Making it mandatory for businesses to accept a specific cryptocurrency is contrary to the ideals of freedom that are supposed to be so important to the crypto space,” Vitalik Buterin said
Cryptocurrency’s origins are based on freedom and decentralization. Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, envisioned cryptocurrency as a peer-to-peer cash network free of government control. Buterin and other crypto enthusiasts may wonder how much El Salvador’s technique aligns with Nakamoto’s original vision, much like the centralisation of mining nodes to big pools.
Users responded to Buterin by noting that El Salvador businesses accept other currencies, and this does not prevent them from being required to accept the USD, for example. Redditors refuted this, maintaining that Bitcoin is not a regulated, government-controlled currency.
However, a lack of cryptocurrency education could harm citizens in El Salvador.
In El Salvador, this technique of pushing BTC to millions of people at once with little or no attempt at prior education is reckless, he said. There is a risk of a large number of innocent people being hacked or scammed.”
In 2014, Buterin coined a term coined Bitcoin Maximalists. A subsection of the cryptocurrency community views Bitcoin as the only viable digital asset, with all altcoins doomed to failure.
“Shame on everyone (OK, I’ll call out the main people responsible: Shame on Bitcoin Maximalists) who are uncritically praising him.”
It is very easy to get Bitcoin Maximalists to praise you: you just need to be in a position of power and do or say nice things about them and their coin,” he said in his other comment.
