Vitalik Buterin: 'Saylor's Comments are Batshit Insane'

• "I'll happily say that I think Saylor's comments are batshit insane," Vitalik Buterin said in response of Jameson Lopp's post on X, in which he argued that are many long-term negative ramifications to convincing people to trust third-party custodians.

"He seems to be explicitly arguing for a regulatory capture approach to protecting crypto ("when you have regulated public entities like Blackrock and Fidelity and ... holding the asset, all the lawmakers and law enforcement arms are invested in those entitites"). There's plenty of precedent for how this strategy can fail, and for me it's not what crypto is about," explained Buterin.

• Saylor has drawn scrutiny from the broader Bitcoin community after a recent interview with NZ Herald senior business journalist Madison Reidy, where the MicroStrategy chairman downplayed the risk of bitcoin being held with large regulated institutions.

"I think that when the bitcoin is held by a bunch of crypto anarchists who aren't regulated entities, who don't acknowledge government, or don't acknowledge taxes, or don't acknowledge reporting requirements, that increases the risk of seizure," said Saylor.

When asked about the concerns of confiscations akin to Executive Order 6102, he added:

"People say that, but mostly its paranoid crypto anarchists who say that, OK? It's a myth and a trope that goes on over and over again."

• Saylor then went on to call these concerns "an inflammatory meme" propagated by hardware wallet sellers.

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