Poland’s Central Bank Secretly Paid YouTubers to Slander Cryptos
trustnodes.com
trustnodes.com
The committee's involvement is not surprising in this case. One of the agency's goals is to provide information about financial risks. It even keeps a public registry of companies reported for not paying their debts (think credit score for businesses). It's very much what they should be involved in. In case anyone thinks they're on the banks' side - they're involved in prosecuting banks and pension funds regularly.
As for the contents of the campaign's site https://uwazajnakryptowaluty.pl/ - it's very reasonable. I couldn't find anything outright wrong on it. It doesn't even tell you that you shouldn't buy Bitcoin. The repeated information and claims are not very different from what you sign when you open a share dealing account - you can lose money, gains are not guaranteed, these investments are not insured, lack of liquidity is possible, etc.
The social advertisement campaigns are also nothing uncommon in Poland. Sober driving, don't dive in shallow water, read to your kids, and similar topics are the common target of the social ads / PSAs that are created when some issue gets too common in the country.
The fact that the are no gov logos in the video clip is weird. (Also the clip is extremely cheesy - think high school video project about misinformation surrounding cryptocurrencies) But the campaign itself seems fine. The post is very sensational.
There was some other campaign couple moths ago that warned about "kryptowaluty i ich podróbki" that tried to target project advertising as cryptocurrencies that are just normal scams like OneCoin and clones (Dascoin etc). I've seen many people here in Poland falling for that.
Sure people make their own decisions, but for it to work there needs to be certain level of information available.
If a countries citizens go and spend their personal money on risky or stupid investments, it is also the countries problem. If those investments fail, you will now probably have to use government funds to bail them out in some way. Bankruptcy is a government bailout of sorts.
Therefore it does not seem unreasonable for a central bank, whose role is ensuring a strong monetary system, to try to educate it's indirect users on good and bad risks to take to try to make the country as a whole more competitive.
If the video should have had attribution is a policy issue for YouTube and the country. Given that attribution would probably have reduced it's effectiveness, I can see why the country would want it without attribution.
> I actually believe that Bitcoin is a purposefully deployed project by large banks to restore faith to the financial system.
It is absolutely grotesque that public institutions engage in any kind of propaganda. It is also , might I add, incompetent, as a central bank revealed to do this shows that the radical crypto libertarians hating on central banks were right.
no it's not... then how would you stop malicious foreign/external media influence? let people get scammed?
how would you counter that?
And now that they were discovered they've just made it a lot worse for themselves because they lost all credibility on the issue.
Also, is it even the central bank's role to do stuff like this? Shouldn't it be a political or governmental issue?
Why? Should I then expect the government to bail me out after I lose all of my money in blackjack, provided that sufficient amount of people do the same.
Sadly, the current party seems to be on the side of stepping in and bailing people out. Once in the instance of mortgages in Swiss Franc, which were taken in '00s (CHF went up significantly several years after, raising people's morgage almost 200%), and secondly in the case of a big precious metals investment scam (Google "Poland Amber Gold").
Those government interventions will not come without costs. A direct one resulting in forcing the taxpayers, which were responsible with their money, to reimburse those who were willing to risk taking a 30-year loan in a foreign currency, or those hoping for high profits from a precious metals investment by a company that existed for less than 2 years on the market. Another cost, which I would argue is a more dangerous one, is destroying fiscal responsibility in the mentality of people. In case of something like bitcoin it can only lead to three outcomes for the ruling party: a) the government regulates/defames or bans bitcoin, b) government accepts that it will need to bail people out at some point once a sufficient amount of "victims" complain, c) it loses the next elections to a party which will promise a bitcoin bail-out
> (...) to try to educate it's indirect users on good and bad risks to take to try to make the country as a whole more competitive. (...) Given that attribution would probably have reduced it's effectiveness, I can see why the country would want it without attribution.
I agree with the educational part, but not so much with the argument for concealing the attribution. The moment someone spills the beans, the smell of "propaganda" can have an opposite effect, i.e., "they did that in secret, because they want to keep taxing you through inflation, that's how powerful bitcoin is".
Well, if the issue grows to such a great scale then bailing people out saves the society, and the economy, from collapsing.
We can argue about the methods, but, well, I guess it's noble that the gov/bank tries to warn people about the dangers of cryptocurrencies. If you look at any crisis around the world the central banks usually turned a blind eye. Then it ended with bailouts and defaults. So, better to act before, than after.
Making up lies with the hope that it will influence behavior in the "right" way is not education and is not the way a government institution should behave.
Because unless there's an awful lot lost in machine translation, the government information website it links to might be anti-crypto slanted but is pretty bland and factual about the risks involved in crypto and its status under Polish law.
(Of course, what's easier to evaluate is the judgement of English language crypto websites like Trustnodes which attack the SEC for "effectively calling investors stupid" for having the temerity to suggest they might not be in possession of all the facts and for the "draconian" halting ICOs that were "legitimate" in every way except perhaps being precisely the sort of unlawful securities offering the SEC is tasked with shutting down. So there's a distinct possibility they just might be exaggerating a tad here)
The basic moral of the video is kind of a combination of don't just assume you're going to get rich off of crypto investing and on a broader stroke, don't put all of your eggs in one basket. (e.g. - don't invest your daily spending money)
> "usually, within a democracy, it is illegal for state actors or contractors to engage in propaganda directed at their own citizens."
This isn't true, or at least I'm not aware of places where it is; this would make it very hard to do "public information" advertising.
the real issue with this is "then how should some gov. agency stop malicious external/foreign media influence?"
It's a problem with you, not the article. Your assumption of propaganda is just speculation.
1. "Instead of killing yourself, why not call a suicide hotline?" I guess BART tracks see elevated levels of suicide. I don't really have much of a problem with this one.
2. "If you let your infant sleep in the bed with you, you are a bad parent." I have a problem with this. What a disgusting thing for the government to be doing.
Now I have no idea if the number of cases was statistically meaningful enough to warrant action, compared to other public health risks. But I can sort of see why someone would be motivated to "do something", considering how devastating something like that must be, even compared to other accidental deaths of infants.
There is a significant association between bed-sharing and infant death. An adult bed presents far more hazards of entrapment, suffocation and strangulation than a properly-designed crib or bassinet. I haven't seen the advert in question and can't comment on how accurately it conveys the evidence, but I think that it's absolutely right to strongly warn parents about the risks of bed-sharing.
If you think that it's disgusting for a government agency to try and save the lives of babies, that's your prerogative.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2016/10/...
As for the grandparent, I think he might be in some english speaking bubble in Poland. My friends that are not IT related and are not living/working abroad are for instance not aware of the same information sources about crypto.
Internet speed ranking is some BS put there to show how Poland is behind. That could be taken out from article. But if author implies that people in Poland are so behind in technology, then they should not dabble in cryptocurrencies, and government is doing right thing.
Just this week I was explaining bitcoin to a friend. He is not frequenting english language internet, only for buying stuff from China. He knew there is bitcoin and that you can earn a lot on it. So I had to make sure that he knows buying bitcoin is buying magic beans from unknown people on internet. So this kind of campaign is good for general public. If someone is really into it, knows risks let him play. For other people, make sure they know the risks and that they can loose real money.
This article is inflammatory and lacks proper context.
It's not about the "tone" or feeling "offended". It's simply uninformed.
For starters, internet speed ranking is only loosely correlated with overall technological advancement - speaking in the context of developed countries, among which these differences tend to be fairly subtle already.
For what it's worth, the same source the author refers to (Akamai) puts Poland ahead of France (by 17%) and Italy (by 37%) in terms of average internet connection speed. https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/our-thinking/state-of-the... - is this supposed to indicate France is less technologically advanced? http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=2017101...
The World Economic Forum's Networked Readiness Index (which "measures the propensity for countries to exploit the opportunities offered by ICT") places Poland at 7th out of 20 Eastern European countries. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/GITR2016/WEF_GITR_Chapter1.1_20...
Also note that the growth rate of R&D expenditure in Poland is among the highest in Europe (Europe in general, not just whatever gets passed off as "Eastern"). http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...
The problem is not the tone, the problem is ignorance - it doesn't matter if they'd sugarcoat it or not.
[1] http://www.wirtualnemedia.pl/artykul/kryptowaluta-digital-pl...
The banking cartels have a vested interest in discouraging the public from taking any interest in cryptocurrencies at all, and they're only getting started. They will bring out the big guns soon, an you'll seeplain as day that the only thing they're interested in is they're bottom line, which is dependent on them controlling all your finances and taking a cut of every transaction you make.
Cryptos are a way to circumvent their control, and it's like cutting off their oxygen supply, if they become too popular the big banks and credit card companies will wither and die.
Got any links about it? That's at least unexpected. One of the parties in the transaction would have to explicitly report that. I'd like to see what that credit line would look like.
The rest I'd expect, since those issues are directly related to Visa / banks protecting themselves from specific transactions. It doesn't even matter that it's specifically cryptocurrency on the other end. Just like they charge more for using credit cards for preorders at standard currency exchanges.
Since the charges imposed by VISA are intimately related to the level of fraud they expect to see from a given vendor & the cryptocurrency space is stuffed to the brim with fraudsters and con artists this ought to be entirely unsurprising.
No cryptic (hah!) conspiracy theory required.
well visa recently realized its mistake & rolled back