Subject: Cryptocurrencies and "blockchain tech" at Cornell From: "Jorge Stolfi" Date: Wed, September 22, 2021 3:49 pm To: cis-dean@cornell.edu Dear Dr. Bala, I was quite dismayed learning that Cornell of courses and projects on cryptocurrencies and "blockchain technology". The experience of the past 12 years have established that cryptocurrencies have nothing good to offer to humanity, but plenty of very bad things. As payment systems, they lose badly to other traditional and emerging solutions, in all aspects -- cost, speed, capacity, convenience, complexity, reliability, security, etc. Even their most ardent proponents now recognize thid fact. The only payments that use bitcoin are *illegal* ones. Not because they are "decentralized" or anything else the proponents claim, but only because the operators ("miners") totally ignore the Know-Your-Customer and Anti-money-Laundering laws when processing payments. Cryptocurrencies are thus the "paypal of crime", a re-edition of the criminal bank Liberty Reserve. It is tanks to bitcoin that ransomware, once hardly heard of, is today the major form of cybercrime, both in number of victims and in the damage caused. Bitcoin has also enabled online purchases of drugs, including fentanyl and fentanyl-laced heroin that have been responsible for tens of thousands of overdose deaths per year. As investments, cryptocurrencies are almost certainly the biggest ponzi scam in history. The ponzi is fueled by perhaps a couple million victims, most of them poor and unable to understand its nature, who keep investing their spare money, for the illusion of becoming rich without effort. In reality there is no external source of revenue -- products or services -- that could return a penny of that money to the investors. On the contrary, there are several money drains that ensure that, as a whole, crypto investors have lost and will only lose money -- lots of it. Bitcoin (BTC) investors alone have provably spend at least 15 billion USD more buying coins than they got from selling them; and this deficit, which is the revenue collected by miners, will only increase -- no matter what happens to the price, or what the investors will do. Thus the losses of crypto investors have probably already exceeded the losses of the investors in Madoff's ponzi. As for "blockchain technology", it is a technological fraud, pure and simple. It does not have the "immutability" or "trustlessness" that promoters claim (the bitcoin blockchain itself was rewound and rewritten twice, in 2010 and 2013). On the other hand, what it is supposed to offer -- a secure append-only log -- has long been implemented using standard distributed database technology; again, with order of magnitude advantages in all aspects. In reality, "blockchain technology" has been only a way for incompetent software developers to obtain funding from companies or venture investors who do not understand it but do not want to seem to be technologically backwards. For all that, and more, the hosting of projects and courses on those subjects is wery much against the principles of scientific honesty, academic integrity, and public interest that Cornell has been upholding through its history. It is as if Cornell's Medical School offered a course on "Treating COVID with Ivermectin", or the Geology and Geophysics department hosted a "Flat Earth Research Group". For the sake of those principles, Cornell should disconnect and distance itself from those endeavors. All the best, Jorge Stolfi Full Professor Institute of Computing State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) PS. For whatever it is worth, I am a Brazilian citizen, with a Ph. D. in computer science from Stanford (1988). And my son graduated from Plant Sciences at Cornell/Ithaca.