According to a report from The Daily Hodl, Balaji Srinivasan, former chief technology officer of Coinbase, has issued a valid warning to the crypto hodl’ers of America.
In an interview with Tom Bilyeu of the Impact Theory podcast aired on June 15th, 2023, Srinivasan made a compelling case for the potential government seizure of crypto from U.S. citizens. Srinivasan warned that in the case of economic instability, governments may seek to seize digital assets in hopes to rebound. He stated that “the biggest risk factor for crypto seizures” is tech industry Goliaths such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft due to their operating system access. Tech companies could play a key role in governments acquiring its citizen’s crypto by simply scanning our devices and surrendering our private keys when decreed.
At 2:40:07 of the Impact Theory podcast, Srinivasan discusses the catalyst for crypto seizure
and states, “G7 countries are going to have a real problem, and they’re going to be hard up for money and then a lot of the world hinges on whether or not the G7 countries and China can seize digital assets. If they can, that’s like one branch point in history. It means that you have total states into CBDCs and so on and so forth. If they cannot, then you have a different branch point in history where it means that communities can now basically have digital gold or cryptocurrency and crowdfund bits of territory where they can have their own startup societies and eventually what I call ‘network states.”
“That’s actually what I’m most concerned about: it is the fact that Apple has software updates and Google can get into your Google Drive and Microsoft has Windows, and if ordered by the state, in theory, they could scan your hard drive for private keys and then pull your digital assets.”
For now, it seems that “trustless” currencies and “trustless” contracts may still call for trust when accessing and transacting with them.
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