Swedish central bank governor: “Trading Bitcoin is trading stamps”
Stefan Ingves, governor of Sweden’s central bank, has disagreed with Bitcoins (BTC) being a far-fetched alternative to traditional fiat currencies.
At a banking conference held in Stockholm, Sveriges Riksbank governor Ingves said that any kind of private wealth like Bitcoins “usually collapses sooner or later.” Further, he remarked that one can definitely get rich by trading in bitcoin, “but it’s comparable to trading in stamps.”
Despite Ingves’ views tagging BTC as a weak currency in comparison to fiat, cryptocurrencies are increasingly becoming popular among the country’s investors. Ingves also highlighted that consumer interest and money laundering are a major concern in the crypto ecosystem, and the June trend of the global crypto markets had gotten “big enough” to attract close attention from lawmakers, regulators and central bankers all around the world.
Also, Riksbank seems unaffected by the governor’s straightforward negative comments and has gone forward in co-opting the blockchain technology to benefit its own central bank digital currency development (CBDC) project.
Sweden’s e-krona employs a proof-of-concept based on Corda, which is a distributed ledger technology solution from R3. Among some of its early updates are that the e-krona experiment is progressing and inviting simulated participants to cooperate with real-world actors, particularly with Handelsbanken, Sweden’s retail bank chain.
Despite global governments continuing to sound alarm against crypto as a fiat alternative, Whistleblower Edward Snowden and Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson have, this week, claimed the possibility of other nation-states incorporating crypto into their monetary policy.
