A crypto investor recently filed a lawsuit of $224 million against the global telecommunication giant AT&T. He alleged that it was the negligence of the company and its employees that resulted in him losing digital tokens worth $24 million. In a recent series of tweets, Jackson Palmer, the creator of Dogecoin has expressed his views on the matter while pointing out the problems with centralised crypto exchanges.
Palmer pointed out that the purpose of cryptocurrencies is to allow people to be their “own bank,” without any centralised party holding user keys. Michael Terpin, the investor who filed the lawsuit, has alleged that he lost digital tokens worth $24 million, that were stored on a centralised platform because of digital identity theft. The theft took place after his cell phone account got transferred to the criminal as no AT&T employee asked for a password or pin during the SIM swap fraud.
In his subsequent tweets, Palmer has made it clear that he does not intend to blame cryptocurrencies for the fraud, nor the people who get victimised during such acts of identity hack. Instead, he said that his statement is a “dig” at crypto investors or traders who trust a centralised exchange to store their cryptocurrencies worth millions in value.
Palmer claimed that giving such authority to a centralised entity results in “defeating the entire purpose of said cryptocurrency.” He reiterated that SIM jacking is “ridiculous” and cell phone service providers “need to get their act together.”
While he feels sorry for the people who are subjected to identity theft and SIM fraud, Palmer also believes that such acts would significantly reduce if cryptocurrencies came to be used for the purpose they were meant to serve. Palmer is also the Group Product Manager for Creative Cloud Growth at Adobe and is passionate about expanding engagement across the complete customer journey.
This is not the first time when an industry veteran criticised centralised exchanges. Earlier this year, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum said that he hopes for such exchanges to “burn in hell.”
