Canadian Bitcoin developer Peter Todd, who was identified as the top Satoshi Nakamoto candidate by HBO last year, has lambasted the idea of including altcoins such as XRP and Solana (SOL) into a strategic cryptocurrency reserve.
Todd insists that such a move would be "an obvious scam" that would only be meant to enrich the "centralized parties" that allegedly control these tokens.
At the same time, Todd argues that a Bitcoin-only reserve would be no different from a gold reserve.
"The Bitcoin part of it is just buying digital gold. Not much different than a strategic gold reserve," Todd said.
The reserve announcement, which initially resulted in double-digit gains for such token as XRP and ADA, was met with widespread criticism.
Tomiwabold OlajideEven pro-crypto voices like Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley have questioned the inclusion of the aforementioned altcoins into the reserve.
Naturally, the announcement attracted a strong backlash from Bitcoin maximalists, who were expecting to see a pure BTC reserve. The proponents of these altcoins believe that such tokens are not sufficiently decentralized to be included in the reserve.
Todd, who was paid by a banking consortium to analyze Ripple back in 2015, has been a longtime critic of XRP.
"The irony of all this is if Ripple just went out and said that XRP is a centralized system we'd all have a much harder time criticizing it…" Todd said back in 2018.
Dan Burgin
Vladislav Sopov