Bitcoin is an unwanted byproduct of the crisis - Benoit Coeure, ECB
|- The Executive Board Member of the European Central Bank expresses a critical attitude towards the world's largest cryptocurrency.
- His view is at par with the one expressed by IMF's head.
The Executive Board Member of the European Central Bank Benoit Coeure is not a big fan of Bitcoin, though he admits that digital money is a clever idea, Bloomberg reports.
“Bitcoin was an extremely clever idea. Sadly, not every clever idea is a good idea,” he said at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel.
Mr. Coeure believes that cryptocurrencies is a product of the global financial crisis as Bitcoin's supposed creator known under Satoshi Nakamoto nickname mined the first block in the wake of Lehman Brothers crash that pushed the world's financial system to the abyss and forced central banks to bail out large financial institutions to avoid systemic risks.
“Few remember that Satoshi embedded the genesis block with a Times headline from January 2009 about U.K. banks’ bailout. In more ways than one, Bitcoin is the evil spawn of the financial crisis,” he said.
Earlier the head of BIS Agustin Carstens called Bitcoin “a combination of a bubble, a Ponzi scheme, and an environmental disaster.”
Meanwhile, Coeure's position is drastically different from the view of IMF's Christine Lagarde, who recently suggested that the central banks should consider issuing their own cryptocurrencies.
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