Andreas Antonopoulos, a widely-followed cryptocurrency advocate and Bitcoin (BTC) maximalist, has expressed concerns about the “insufficient levels of privacy and fungibility Bitcoin currently offers.”
Antonopoulos, a data communications and distributed systems postgraduate from the University College London, believes “delays in the introduction” and implementation of the appropriate Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) may potentially have adverse effects on the cryptocurrency’s ongoing development.
“Failed-State Regions” Meet Criteria For Bitcoin Adoption
According to Antonopoulos, whose comments came during an interview with Diar at the Deconomy Conference in South Korea, “failed-state regions meet the criteria for the necessity of Bitcoin’s propositions as a transferable censorship-resistant store-of-value (SoV),” Diar Newsletter noted.
Diar’s blog post further mentioned that Antonopoulos thinks Bitcoin will be adopted by nations suffering from socioeconomic challenges such as “political instability and financial infrastructure failures that constrain fund movement and devastate savings due to hyperinflation.” The Certified Bitcoin Professional argued that Bitcoin is not just an investment opportunity, as its main use case might be in helping those who may not having access to modern banking services.
Antonopoulos remarked:
The ease of use has not reached parity with other financial services so there is no motivation to use cryptocurrency. Adoption remains, for the most part, limited to disaster countries where the difficulty of using cryptocurrency is less than the difficulty of not using it because of crisis. So, it finds a niche.
In addition to challenges Bitcoin faces such as its scalability problem and its technology being difficult to understand and use for those who don’t have a technical background, Antonpoulos believes the illicit use of the cryptocurrency may be an even more serious problem. He stated:
Tainted coins are very destructive. If you break fungibility and privacy, you break the currency.
“It’s Possible To Attack Bitcoin In Ways We Haven’t Seen Yet”
He added: “If [fungibility] is not fixed, it is possible to attack Bitcoin in ways we haven’t seen yet and that could prove very effective. You could see a rapid evolution of Bitcoin in a privacy direction or even replacement by other privacy cryptocurrencies.”
Monero (XMR) and Zcash (ZEC) are some of the most widely adopted privacy coins. Both XMR and ZEC use sophisticated cryptography in order to provide financial privacy to their users. Although Zcash and Monero have experienced technical challenges with their ongoing development, they have active developer communities and other cryptocurrency platforms have either integrated some of their privacy tech (such as zk-SNARKS) or are in the process of doing so.
