The head of the BIS says fiat won the battle with crypto, but the Bitcoin community disagrees.
The general manager of the BIS, Agustn Carstens, thinks that fiat has won the battle between fiat and crypto. The group doesn’t agree.
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has been careful about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for a long time. BIS says that there is no need to be careful anymore because “the battle has been won” between fiat and crypto.
In an interview with Bloomberg, BIS general manager Agustn Carstens made the claim. He said, among other things, that “technology doesn’t make for trusted money.”
As the central bank for central banks, the BIS has stressed the need for regulation and risk management in the crypto space. But its claim that the battle between crypto and fiat has been won made people in the Bitcoin and crypto communities angry, funny, and correct.
Ray Youssef, CEO of Paxful and an outspoken Bitcoin maximalist, told Cointelegraph, “It’s easy to get caught up in these fights, but they’re all a waste of time with no return on investment.” He said, “We must fight for every inch and every eyeball in the wars in the global south.” “What is going on in Nigeria right now is important for all of us.”
“Want to irritate the clowns?” Ignore their scare tactics and pay attention to what is happening in the global south and on the streets of Nigeria.
The author of The Bitcoin Standard, Saifedean Ammous, told his followers about Carsten’s statement. This led to criticism and worry in the comments. “These people are clowns,” said SVN (not his real name), a Bitcoin supporter from Florida whose frozen bank account made him decide to go all in on Bitcoin.
Lady Anarki, a supporter of Bitcoin who recently shut down a company that taught people about Bitcoin security, said that “fiat and crypto are basically the same exact scam.”
Carstens said that Bitcoin losing the “war” for money is another way to say that Bitcoin has been called dead, dead, and dead again. The bear market in 2022 and 2023 is the same, and Bitcoin supporters on Twitter took the chance to make fun of financial experts who were dancing on the made-up grave of the decentralised currency.
Still, Bitcoin is up more than 40% from its low point in 2022, and more people are using the Lightning Network while the community seems to be getting louder.
This week, Peter McCormack, who hosts the popular podcast What Bitcoin Did, tweeted some useful statistics to correct a new statement from the BIS that was also controversial. The BIS said that from August 2015 to December 2022, “almost all economies lost money on their Bitcoin holdings.”
Even though the BIS is trying to stop it, the price of bitcoin keeps going up, as shown.
The BIS has been an outspoken critic of cryptocurrencies, citing worries about their volatility, ability to scale, and energy use. But the BIS has looked into stablecoins and is leading the development of central bank digital currencies with the help of several countries. This is in contrast to what Carsten said in the Bloomberg interview, which was that technology “doesn’t make for trusted money.”
