Vivaldi browser is the latest company that has criticized cryptocurrency. It said it won’t provide Cryptocurrency wallets in its browser because it doesn’t want users to participate in crypto trading something CEO Jon von Tetzchner describes as “at best a gamble and at worst a scam.”
Vivaldi is a cross-platform, freeware web browser that was created by Tatsuki Tomita and Jon von Tetzchner. Jon von Tetzchner was also the CEO and co-founder of Opera Software.
This development comes one week after rivals Mozilla While the company announced that it would accept donations via cryptocurrency, they quickly backtracked and said that the policy would be paused. As for Vivaldi boss Tetzchner “cryptocurrency is more than a pyramid scheme posing as currency,” adding that cryptocurrency has been touted by many as a revolution in currency, the future of investment, and a breakthrough technology.”
He also criticised the way that digital coins are sold to potential investors. He writes that cryptocurrencies can’t be used as actual currency and people view them as an investment scheme. The problem is that in order to make actual money from the system, you must find someone willing and able to buy the tokens you hold. This is only possible if they believe they can sell them to someone who will pay more. And so on.
On environmental disasters
Tetzchner believes that theEnergy consumption for cryptocurrency miningAnother major concern is the use of Bitcoin as a means to store energy. “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 blog post.
While many of us are working hard to reduce our carbon footprints and do so, it is counterproductive to indulge technology that undoes our hard work, he says.
Tetzchner believes that the entire crypto fantasy is designed to lure you into a system that is “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.”
While other browsers, such as Opera, support cryptowallets, Vivaldi boss says that Vivaldi is unlikely to follow the same 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 emphasized.
