The just-announced Memorial Stadium naming rights deal — in which the United States branch of FTX Cryptocurrency Derivatives Exchange, or FTX, is supposed to pay a total of $17.5 million over 10 years for the naming rights to Memorial Stadium — represents UC Berkeley possibly setting its reputation on fire for a meager gain. The campus should either overrule the athletic department’s deal or, if that is not possible, reduce its contribution to the athletic department over the next 10 years by an equal amount...
To start, cryptocurrencies themselves do not work for normal payments. Their very design means that despite more than a decade of “innovation,” they are still only useful for transactions blocked by the normal financial system, such as buying drugs or paying off million-dollar ransoms.
At the same time, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are extremely inefficient. Bitcoin consumes roughly the same amount of energy as Malaysia, yet can only process less than seven transactions per second worldwide...
Within the cryptocurrency space, FTX doesn’t represent any financial innovation and is instead best described as a legalized “bucket shop,” or a gambling operation for those who want to bet on whether or not a particular price will go up...
By accepting payment in cryptocurrency, UC Berkeley is implicitly endorsing payment channels more effective for criminal rather than commercial activity, and for whose security depends entirely on the waste of stunning amounts of energy...
Nicholas Weaver is a lecturer in the computer science department and a computer security researcher. He is also a UC Berkeley graduate, having earned a bachelor’s degree in astrophysics/computer science in 1995 and a doctorate in computer science in 2003.
Full op ed at https://www.dailycal.org/2021/09/03/cancel-the-memorial-stadium-naming-rights-deal/.
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NOTE: Our prior post on this topic is at:
http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2021/08/tales-from-cryptocurrency-at-uc-berkeley.html.
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