Monday 14 June 2021
Experts doubt the crypto boom
Musk drives Bitcoin price up with tweet
With Bitcoin, Elon Musk is back and forth, after all, his tweets have an extreme influence on the price of the crypto currency. With his new twitter he is driving the course upwards. For experts it is also proof that Bitcoin has little future as an everyday means of payment.
Bitcoin gained ten percent at the beginning of the week and jumped back over the $ 40,000 mark. A tweet from Tesla boss Elon Musk provided a tailwind, who announced over the weekend that the cryptocurrency might be accepted as a means of payment again if the use of renewable energies in the leading digital currency were expanded to around 50 percent.
“Musk’s words made Bitcoin soar,” said Simon Peters, a market analyst at eToro. “After the strategy swing obviously means before the strategy swing”, commented analyst Timo Emden from Emden Research on the move. After only seven weeks, Musk stopped accepting Bitcoin as a means of payment for a Tesla electric car a month ago, justifying this with the high energy consumption in the crypto sector.
Musk had already announced in May that Bitcoin would be accepted as a means of payment again if the currency were to be mined with sustainable energy. The U-turn of the crypto fan Musk had caused the Bitcoin price to collapse. “It remains to be seen whether investors really buy Elon Musk’s back and forth at the end of the day,” said Emden.
Carstens: “Bitcoin is only good for two things”
Even if American franchise chains such as Starbucks are now accepting crypto as payment, there are doubts about the entry of the mined currency into everyday financial life. According to AgustÃn Carstens, head of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), bitcoin is a “speculative asset” and has “no practical use”. The cryptocurrency is only good for two things: for speculating and for ransom payments, he told “Spiegel”. “Crypto currencies are not a good store of value because they are so volatile; they are not a medium of exchange because they are hardly accepted; and they are not a threat to real currencies either because they are not used for the same purpose,” said Carstens further.
Although cryptocurrencies are gaining in importance alongside payment methods such as cash, credit cards or PayPal, the state central banks will not influence this, according to Carstens. “Today and in the foreseeable future, cryptocurrencies do not play a relevant role in the financial system. Therefore, they will not influence the monetary policy of the central banks”, the BIS head predicted.
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