European Central Bank argues against Bitcoin ETF | Hacker News Reader

European Central Bank argues against Bitcoin ETF

ecb.europa.eu

5 pointsp4bl05 comments

IMF finds in its study that giving citizens more options for their savings, like cryptocurrencies, is going to force central banks to strengthen their monetary policies. Before money was the monopoly right of the state. No longer. Thus if there is an option for better money over central bank money it's likely people will switch. This can explain some of dislike central banks have for cryptocurrencies.

https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fintech-notes/Issues/202...

Interesting study. It’s not about “dislike” or “better money” but central banks’ (democratic) mandate for a balanced monetary policy, which gets more challenging if you have large capital flows via crypto.

> This underscores that widespread crypto adoption can weaken policymakers’ available options for mitigating external shocks and potentially increase cross-country spillovers.

Thank you for a good comment.

It’s dislike in a sense that it exposes the impotence of central bankers, and any hocus pocus cannot fix the underlying issues. No one likes the fact that your work is being criticised, you need to work harder or in the worst cases you just cannot lie to your people. The examples here include Argentina, Turkey and now Nigeria, where it’s possible to argue that the citizens would have been better off without a central bank in the first place. The central banking was, at least, partially the cause of the crisis and their mandate to manage balanced monetary policy was part of other public lies.

I don't like banks, but cryptocurrencies also don't seem to be a good option, they stimulate crime, and the shear waste of power sure isn't helping climate either, there must be a better solution!

I'm only interested in bitcoin, but to say it wastes power would be extremely misguided.

1. The energy (work) the miners put into mining is fundamental to any sound money: it's proof of work. This is ultimately what money is (or should be). Take a look a gold - in order to mine gold, on average you have to put in work of equivalent economic value to the gold you find. This is fundamental to a fair society. With fiat currencies, a few select people are allowed to create trillions of $ at a few key strokes, it's value sucked out of the existing dollars (i.e. the ones in your bank account, wages, pension) and then charge interest on it as if it was their own. The is the root of many of the problems we're seeing today: wars, cost-of-living, growing divide between the super-rich and everyone else. Central banking truly is a cancer on the world, one who's ultimate end is to enslave its population.

2. The bitcoin miners are heavily incentivised to use the cheapest energy they can find, and they're - and this is very important to understand - not geographically constrained, unlike almost any other user of energy. This means that they will naturally disperse to locations where there is energy that no one else wants (i.e. otherwise wasted energy), in order to be viable.

Bitcoin allows people to escape the enslavement of central banking-orientated societies. In order to understand how important and useful it is, you need to see the problem that it's fixing, and while people look through the lens of the dollar they only see real-estate, stock-market, food etc. prices going up, rather than the value of their dollars going down, and to whom that value is being stealthily transferred to.

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