You gotta admit that if we disregard the intention of her comments for a moment, the term "shadowy" "super-coders" does kind of have a nice ring to it.
I'm thanking Decrypt for the catchy headline of course.
The full quote would be what Sen. Elizabeth Warren seemingly read off the notes in front of her...
"This sounds to me like a lousy trade off. Instead of leaving our financial system at the whims of giant banks, crypto puts the system at the whims of some shadowy faceless group of super-coders and miners."
The comment was made at a Senate hearing yesterday titled "Cryptocurrencies: What are they good for?"
Sure, there were several people at the hearing who expressed positive views on decentralized currency, but even the name of this hearing seems like bad news.
What I mean is they are asking questions as if our industry poses some sort of threat to financial stability.
Now, the answer to that will largely depend on your definition of financial stability. If you mean the status quo, then yes. They probably should be pretty scared.
However, Warren's comments here do indicate that she doesn't really understand decentralization, or is being fed bad information.
The trust that people have in cryptocurrencies is not about the coders, it's about the code. And open-source, verifiable code does not have whims.