- Bjarne Stroustrup believes that bitcoin is as good as dead.
- The expert regrets that bitcoin is written on C++.
Bjarne Stroustrup is a famous computer scientist from Denmark and a creator of a wildly popular programming language C++. He said he regrets that bitcoin is written with his tool and believes that this cryptocurrency is doomed.
“Let me say it this way. When you build the tool, you don’t know how it’s gone to be used. You try to improve the tool looking on how it’s being used but (…) really you have no control on how the thing is used. So, I’m very happy and proud of some things C++ is being used at and some other things I wish people wouldn’t do. Bitcoin mining be my favourite example. It uses as much energy as Switzerland and mostly serves criminals,” he said, speaking in the interview with an artificial intelligence expert Lex Fridman and a host of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.
Stroustrup believes that the decreasing trading volumes of bitcoin indicate that the first cryptocurrency cannot attract new buyers and will soon cease to exist.
Notably, the scientist thinks that blockchain is a genius invention, though at this stage cryptocurrencies are its only real use case. The Chinese newspaper Xinhua recently expressed the similar view by saying that bitcoin is the best use case for blockchain.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are often suspected in tight connections with criminals. Thus, according to the recent report prepared by Europe, bitcoin remains the preferred digital coin of cyber criminals. The volume of bitcoin transactions in darknet may surpass $1 billion threshold in 2019.