BTC Opponent Agustin Carstens Started Supporting Cryptocurrencies

BTC Opponent Agustin Carstens is making a U-turn on cryptocurrencies since many of the large banks worldwide are considering their own digital currency. Let’s see what he thinks now in the altcoin news below.

Carstens is the CEO of the Bank for International Settlements and he claimed as reported in the Financial Times:

 “Many central banks are working on it; we are working on it, supporting them,” Mr Carstens told the Financial Times. And it might be that it is sooner than we think that there is a market and we need to be able to provide central bank digital currencies.”

The BTC opponent was so strongly opposing central banks and their idea of creating their own digital currencies. He made clear that the crypto assets backed by central banks could only result in financial instability. His view is not surprising since he called bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies ‘’a bubble’’, Ponzi scheme and also ‘’environmental disaster.’’ Carstens also believed that Bitcoin is an asset class that doesn’t really serve the purpose of real money and that its high volatility in price makes the asset a poor store of value:

 “No cryptocurrency is a true unit of account or a payment instrument, and we have seen this year that they are a poor store of value. Buyers of cryptocurrencies are buying into nothing more than a software algorithm.”

His comments that the BIS is now supporting other banks is surprising mainly because of his criticism towards bitcoin. It looks like he is afraid of becoming irrelevant in the fast-developing fintech space where big players such as Facebook and major investment banks are getting in to. As noted in the latest cryptocurrency news, the big banks and the government institutions around the world are fearing that the launch of Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency will disrupt the financial markets. They also fear that the crypto project will create a parallel financial system because of the huge user base.

Former World Bank chief economist Kaushik Basu, believes that the adoption of Libra will be very problematic for central banks if millions of users decide to keep their money off the banks’ accounts. This way, the monetary policy tools will become useless.