Former CTO of Coinbase: If the US wants to get COVID-19 under control, we’ll have to bite the bullet
According to former CTO of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, Balaji Srinivasan, the US public may need to come up with something to help stop the spread of the new Coronavirus. And the best solution in getting the virus under control is aggressive testing and tracing – which is something for which the government of South Korea has been applauded.
Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase
Former CTO of Coinbase tweeting about the new Coronavirus since January
Srinivasan has spent the past several months, mostly talking about COVID-19. He constantly warned people seriously about the Coronavirus epidemic.
Sharing with hosts Michael Casey and Laura Shin during an interview at Coindesk’s Consensus Distributed conference today, Srinivasan said:
“I’m in favor of crypto and decentralization, but I am also a pragmatist. It was the lockdown at Wuhan that made me, as well as other people, aware that this could be a very big deal, because the Chinese government doesn’t usually do things like that.”
Many countries have already contained COVID-19 in a few weeks.
Not infinite lockdown. Nor reopening too soon. Get new cases to zero and then keep the reproduction number below one.
These green zones will have better economies and healthier populations in the long run. pic.twitter.com/m1ZvwwUZR1
— Balaji S. Srinivasan (@balajis) May 4, 2020
The Korean government has done a great job of controlling the Coronavirus disease. That’s because the country accepts the use of multiple surveillance technologies, notably CCTV and bank card tracking and mobile phone use. More liberal countries like the US are not willing to take these types of measures.
Srinivasan thinks we may have to swallow the bullet. And he doesn’t see a quick blockchain fix to the problem.
Former CTO of Coinbase said:
“It is easy to get a centralized solution up and working in a short period of time in a pandemic and an emergency. And the surveillance apparatus is already in place.”
He later said the NSA has been surveilling Americans since at least 2014 after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed the agency’s data collection tactics. So at least we will get some benefits from that.
He argued that the key is not to position contact tracing as a bad choice in a vacuum. Instead, the public ought to consider it a less bad choice, given the spectrum of bad choices that are available.
He said:
“It is basically like fighting a war. Once you are in peacetime, you can hopefully back off on these kinds of policies—and if not use crypto to decentralize.”
He didn’t spell out how the cryptocurrency would help people backtrack from heavy surveillance, however. But then again, it was a short interview.
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