‘Scam, pyramid scheme, environmental disaster’, Vivaldi CEO on cryptocurrencies

Vivaldi browser is the newest firm to take stand in opposition to cryptocurrency. It mentioned it gained’t present cryptocurrency wallets in its browser as a result of it doesn’t need customers to take part in crypto buying and selling – one thing CEO Jon von Tetzchner describes as “at best a gamble and at worst a scam.”
For the uninitiated, Vivaldi is a freeware, cross-platform net browser, an organization based by Tatsuki Tomita and Jon von Tetzchner, who was the co-founder and CEO of Opera Software.
The growth comes every week after rival Mozilla introduced accepting donations through cryptocurrencies however swiftly backtracked, saying the coverage can be paused and reviewed. As for Vivaldi boss Tetzchner “cryptocurrency is more than a pyramid scheme posing as currency,” including that “cryptocurrency has been touted by many as a revolution in currency, the future of investment, and a breakthrough technology.”

He additionally criticized the best way digital cash are offered to budding traders. “Since cryptocurrencies are too volatile to be used as an actual currency, people treat it as a sort of investment scheme,” he writes. “The problem is that to extract actual money from the system you have to find someone willing to buy the tokens you are holding. And this is only likely to happen as long as they believe they will be able to sell them on to someone who’ll pay even more for them. And so on, and so on.”

On environmental disasters
For Tetzchner, the power consumption of cryptocurrency mining is one other main concern. “The energy usage of Bitcoin alone is staggering, consuming as much electricity as some countries. And this is likely to keep increasing as the technology behind it does not and cannot scale in any reasonable way,” he wrote in a weblog submit.
“While so many of us are trying our best to reduce our carbon footprints, it feels counterproductive to indulge in technology that undoes that hard work,” he provides.

Tetzchner believes that your entire crypto fantasy is designed to lure you right into a system that’s “extremely inefficient, consumes vast amounts of energy, uses large amounts of hardware that could better be spent doing something else and will quite often result in the average person losing any money they might put into it.”
Although different browser comparable to Opera, supply help for cryptowallets, the Vivaldi boss says there’s no probability Vivaldi will go down the identical path. “By creating our own cryptocurrency or supporting cryptocurrency-related features in the browser, we would be helping our users to participate in what is at best a gamble and at worst a scam. It would be unethical, plain and simple,” he emphasised.