Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin condemns the Canadian Government’s latest moves while speaking at the ETHDenver conference, says that such events demonstrate why cryptocurrencies exist.
Vitalik Buterin was calling out the government for trying to constrain the funding for the protesting truckers’ rally show.
In Brief:
- Vitalik Buterin criticizes the Canadian government for using banks to quell protests.
- He talked about his upcoming book ‘Proof of Stake’ whose release date is not announced yet.
Buterin, at the same time, was disappointed with the “free convoys” protesting the COVID-19 restrictions in Ottawa last week.
He noted, “If the truckers are blocking the roads and that’s breaking the economy, fine, blocking the roads is illegal and there are laws to regulate it.”
In an effort to tamp down the protests, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government imposed seldom used authoritative powers.
Banks and other financial institutions were given the authority to freeze or suspend accounts associated with the trucker convoy without a court order, and they were shielded from civil liability for doing so.
Supporters of the truckers have attempted to bypass the blockades by donating cryptocurrencies.
The government has blacklisted several crypto addresses involved in this, and the court has frozen the funds pending the results of a private class-action lawsuit.
Government and police can continue to operate legally and track down suspects “as always” without the need for financial intermediaries, he argued.
“This concept of going after intermediaries and using intermediaries to bypass all that, it is dangerous. Having decentralized alternatives to an intermediary is a good way to limit the damage.”
Aside from the issues in Canada, Buterin spoke about the intellectual fundamentals that drive blockchain development at the conference.
Rather than debating the technology’s hypothetical political properties, he argued that the focus should be on the technology’s “intellectual properties”: in this case, the distinction between “theory” and “empiricism.”
Buterin asserted that, while crypto development is driven by mathematical and social theories, other fields of technology, such as artificial intelligence, rely on empirical testing.
According to him, a theory is frequently viewed with skepticism because the math-based guarantees can be incorrect and thus disastrous. A failed consensus mechanism could simply wipe out the value of a blockchain.
Along with being the co-founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin is also famous for his write-ups which give deep insights into crypto space. Of course, he didn’t forget to promote his upcoming book after all the discussions at the conference. The release date of the book titled “Proof of Stake: The Making of Ethereum and the Philosophy of Blockchains,” is not announced yet. Just last month he published a weblog about non-transferable NFTs which he calls ‘Soulbound.’ He feels that in some cases few NFTs are not worth giving.
