Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin assessed the risks bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies. He shared his concerns about technical problems and regulatory threats.

In a new interview for the podcast What Bitcoin Did, Vitalik Buterin said that he sees risks for the development of the cryptocurrency market in technical problems and unfriendly policies of the authorities of various countries.

“So the thing that I tend to worry about — I mean one is that there’s always this kind of black swan risk of technical failure. What if the NSA comes out with a quantum computer out of the blue and just steals a bunch of coins before you can do anything about it?

[The second one is] political failure. So what if governments banned Bitcoin, commandeered the mining pools and use that to do what I call a 51% spawn camping attack – attacking the chain over and over again until it becomes non-viable? And meanwhile, the prices are low because the thing’s banned and there’s a crisis of confidence?"

Buterin also suggested that over the long term, bitcoin runs the risk of losing investor confidence.

“Bitcoin doesn’t have what I call functionality escape velocity. So basically, sufficient functionality to serve as a trustless base layer for a lot of different applications. As a result of this, there’s a possibility that over time people will find Bitcoin less and less interesting and other platforms more interesting."

However, he noted that bitcoin as well as ETH are used as a medium of exchange and store of value, thus carrying out the two leading functions of money. But as a unit of account, neither ETH nor BTC cannot yet fully be considered competitors of fiat money.