“Unpopular opinion: El Salvador president Mr Nayab (sic) Bukele should not be praised by crypto community,” a Reddit user on the r/cryptocurrency site stated.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, in an unexpected Reddit post on Friday, slammed El Salvador’s Bitcoin rollout, especially President Nayib Bukele for pushing local companies to accept the top cryptocurrency.
“Unpopular opinion: El Salvador president Mr Nayab (sic) Bukele should not be praised by crypto community,” a Reddit member on the r/cryptocurrency site said.
Buterin said thus ”
“This viewpoint is not unpopular. Making it necessary for companies to accept a single cryptocurrency goes against the crypto space’s core values of freedom and decentralisation.”
Buterin went on to say: “This strategy of simultaneously distributing BTC to millions of individuals in El Salvador with practically no prior education is risky, and it risks a huge number of innocent people being hacked or defrauded.
Shame on everyone who is mindlessly applauding him (well, alright, I’ll name the primary culprits: shame on Bitcoin maximalists).”
Indeed, Bukele’s acceptance of Bitcoin as legal money, which he originally announced with considerable hoopla at the Bitcoin Miami conference in June, has garnered him praise from some of Bitcoin’s most prominent advocates.
Those same Bitcoin proponents have been less enthusiastic about discussing the young president’s well-documented authoritarian inclinations and the less savoury parts of his government’s Bitcoin rollout.
“It crushes my soul to see Bitcoin maximalists around the world cheering this when, if they actually sat down and read the law and regulations, it is completely opposite to everything they preach.” one Salvadoran company owner, who requested anonymity, told Decrypt.
And Buterin isn’t the only crypto expert who sees the inconsistencies in imposing an open, decentralised technology on company owners.
During a panel discussion at the TOKEN2049 conference in London this week, Blockchain.com co-founder Nicolas Cary remarked, “I believe there are some genuine concerns of the program’s top-down implementation in El Salvador.
One of the key tenets of cryptocurrency is that it is really grassroots, with individuals participating willingly.”
Buterin didn’t just leave it at that. “It’s like he pushed it because he bought at cheaper price and knew a country adopting a crypto would alone take the price high enough to make him rich,” a person remarked further down in the same post regarding Bukele.
Buterin responded by saying, “Simpler and dumber hypothesis: he just enjoys being lauded by powerful people, both for political reasons and because he’s a human person like the rest of us (ie. Americans).
You can easily persuade Bitcoin maximalists to applaud you if you are in a position of power and do or say great things about them and their coin.”
