IT Analyst Jason Bloomberg: What I'm Really Saying Is 'Shut Down Permissionless Blockchains'

What's wrong with permissionless blockchainsOlivia Capozzalo: So, you have a reputation for saying some pretty bold things about cryptocurrency.

When I say, "Shut all the cryptocurrencies down," what I'm really saying is "Shut down the permissionless ones." If cryptocurrency is going to survive, we'll have to move to a permissioned infrastructure.

What I would expect to happen is, over time, as various organizations and governments, as well as banks and Wall Street trading firms realize that permissionless cryptocurrency has these issues, then gradually the trend would be to encourage permissioned systems versus permissionless - and that would drive down the value of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that run on permissionless systems.

So if you drive down the value sufficiently, then it is no longer cost-effective to mine the cryptocurrency.

What do you say to the people who really care about the decentralized aspect of cryptocurrency when you are talking about shifting the entire value system?

JB: The criminal involvement in cryptocurrency was one of the original reasons why cryptocurrency took off, so it's one of the reasons why Bitcoin became as popular as it did in the earlier days.

What cryptocurrency has become is not only a way for criminals to get into the mining, but it's a way to conduct criminal transactions, it's a way to conduct hacking.

The dark web wasn't really practical - because there was no good way of exchanging funds - until cryptocurrency came along.

You think the solution, just to clarify, is not to deal with preventing that kind of an attack or mitigating it in some way, but actually shut down cryptocurrency because cryptocurrency is the problem here.

It would be great if I could say, "Well, we'll just shut down cryptocurrency, that's going to stop crypto mining." And yes, it would, but I don't think it's practical for the reasons I listed: There's no one country, it's no one country's laws.