Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin criticized the forced adoption of bitcoin in El Salvador in a comment he made to a Reddit forum on Friday.
Writing in a forum entitled “Unpopular opinion: El Salvador President Mr Nayab Bukele should not be praised by Crypto community,” Vitalik Buterin, under his Reddit user name of vbuterin, said that “Nothing unpopular about this opinion. Making it mandatory for businesses to accept a specific cryptocurrency is contrary to the ideals of freedom that are supposed to be so important to the crypto space. Additionally, this tactic of pushing BTC to millions of people in El Salvador at the same time with almost no attempt at prior education is reckless, and risks a large number of innocent people getting hacked or scammed. Shame on everyone (ok, fine, I’ll call out the main people responsible: shame on Bitcoin maximalists) who are uncritically praising him.”
“Simpler and dumber hypothesis: both for political reasons and because he’s a human being like the rest of us, he just loves being praised by people he considers powerful (ie. Americans). Bitcoin maximalists are a very easy community to get to praise you: you just have to be in a position of power and do or say nice things about them and their coin.”
The law has since been the subject of intense criticism due to the El Salvador government’s authoritarian tendency, which essentially ran counter to the libertarian slant of Bitcoin, and by extension, cryptocurrency’s spirit. El Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele has been criticized for his strategy that were used to push this specific subject, with Bukele even going on to his Twitter bio to call himself the “the coolest dictator in the world” who has ushered in the new policy.
