The opinion of Harvard University cryptographer and technology researcher Bruce Schneier is that cryptocurrency is useless to anyone other than individuals trying to move money without being noticed by the government.
Schneier believes that the aims of Bitcoin according to its original whitepaper have been defeated by the reality of its deployment, which means that in addition to being operationally difficult and risky, it also fails to deliver on its basic premise.
Schneier writing in Wired, cited the trust issue as the biggest example of cryptocurrency’s basic failure. According to him, while it was created to provide a basis for electronic transactions without relying on trust, a critical look at the architecture of blockchain technology will show that it cannot function without trust.
Crypto users have to trust that miners are following the right sequences to mine bitcoins then trust that the system won’t crash resulting in monetary loss.
He said:
“If your bitcoin exchange gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If your bitcoin wallet gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If you forget your login credentials, you lose all of your money. If there’s a bug in the code of your smart contract, you lose all of your money. If someone successfully hacks the blockchain security, you lose all of your money. In many ways, trusting technology is harder than trusting people. Would you rather trust a human legal system or the details of some computer code you don’t have the expertise to audit?”