Stablecoins have no chance to surpass Bitcoin – Adam Back

Blockstream CEO Adam Back said Facebook's Libra had nothing to do with cryptocurrencies, while stablecoins and central bank digital currencies (CBDC) pale in comparison with bitcoin. Об этом создатель алгоритма Hashcash рассказал Cointelegraph.

I think that blockchains are more about permissionless, uncensorable usage and free-market money - separating money from state - using a gold-like mined digital commodity money: Bitcoin. I think while it is possible and useful for some use cases, like crypto trading, to have stable coins, they inherently fall short of Bitcoin as they have custody risk, and if there is a central bank underwriting also traditional establishment interests reflected in the operation which may look unattractive to users, he said in the interview with Cointelegraph.

He also noted that the digital currencies of central banks that defend the interests of the establishment may seem unattractive to users, although they have a chance to become successful.

Companies, after all, do have a financial interest to reduce signup and usage friction experienced by users. Governments are more insulated from market competition being policy monopolies. So we'll see how things develop in various countries, but I would think of today’s stablecoins as lacking much of the self-sovereignty properties of Bitcoin, and potential future central government-operated ones similarly, he added.

Back also commented on the Libra initiative from Facebook, saying that the new coin will become another “banking application in a modern way”:

Effectively though, as Libra showed, it will not be a decentralized cryptocurrency and is more a business consortium competitor to Venmo, PayPal, and QQ Pay, just with a user interface that looks like a crypto wallet.  

Earlier this year, Back said that Bitcoin sidechains would kill alttcoins. He believes that altoona will become useless and financially impractical.