The MIT Technology Review published an article today, April 24, entitled "Let's Destroy Bitcoin," detailing three ways in which the cryptomoeda could be "toppled."
The first option, according to the article, is an overlap of Bitcoin by the government with the creation of a currency backed by the Federal Reserve (Fedcoin):
"The year is two-thousand-and-many, and it's tax payday. But you do not send. Instead, an algorithm automatically makes a withdrawal from your wallet, in a currency called Fedcoin. "
This new blockchain would have already verified financial institutions as authorized nodes instead of peer-to-peer networks, "basically trusted institutions," Sahil Gupta of Yale told the MIT Technology Review. The article notes that the Bank of Canada constructed a simulation of this system in Ethereum (ETH) in 2016.
The second option is a sneaky acquisition of Bitcoin by Facebook, which involves creating a BTC wallet for all social network users, rewarding them in crypto-currency for interacting with ads and giving them an ad-free experience if you authorize the Facebook to mine using the unused power of your computer (as Salon offered earlier this year):
"If Facebook could persuade a large enough fraction of Bitcoin users and miners to run their own proprietary version of Bitcoin software, then the company would dictate the rules. It could then reshape Bitcoin as a corporate version of Fedcoin described above. "
Facebook can also take control of Bitcoin by issuing its own crypto-currency, as well as the messaging application Telegram is doing after its combined $ 1.7 billion combined initial currency offerings earlier this year.
The third way to make Bitcoin "irrelevant" is to create multiple new crypto-coins for each situation:
"In the digital wallet of your phone, you find not only Fedcoin and FacebookCoin, but also AppleCash, ToyotaCash, and a specific currency of the store you are in. There is also a coin that can be rescued by nanny services and another that takes you to your local subway system. "
This option, according to the MIT Technology Review, is already "happening," as companies are creating their own currencies or tokens to be used only by their services, such as Kodak's ICO to form a currency used to license photographs.
Since Bitcoin can prevent any of these options from occurring, it is to take advantage of them, that is, "transactions with Bitcoin are anonymous and impossible to censor."
However, the article notes that the US National Security Agency (NSA) is already attempting to merge people's identities with their BTC addresses, according to documents leaked by Edward Snowden, and whether governments "seek to create and strengthen blacklists "of" crucial "BTC miners.
By the end of March, Snowden had said in an interview that Bitcoin's book Blockchain was "devastatingly public" and that a good alternative to the decree that can not be controlled by the government has yet to appear.
The MIT Technology Review concludes that "if the cryptomoedas are widely used, it will be the habits of the masses, not the desires of the early Bitcoin adherents, that determine what will happen to Satoshi Nakamoto's vision."