While the head of the Bank of England and Chairman of the financial stability Board mark Carney does not consider cryptocurrencies as a direct threat to the global financial system, the head of Brazil’s Central Bank still sees plenty of reason for concern.
In comments to Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo before the G20 summit Goldfine Ilan (Ilan Goldfajn ) stated that cryptocurrencies still not have the stability necessary for safe and lawful exchange of assets.
Rather, Goldfine said that he prefers to think of them as “crypto-asset”, not a “cryptocurrency”.
“I don’t call them money because the money needs to be stable and to facilitate the payments,” he explained. “I see them more as assets and risks because they have the support of the Central Bank”.
Recall that the topic of cryptocurrency is on the agenda of several meetings in the framework of the summit of “Big twenty”, held in Buenos Aires this week. Goldfine explained that the purpose of these meetings is to “see what is making each country and what are the benefits of these actions, because we are all in favour of technology.”
He also repeated warnings about the potential uses of crypto-currencies to Fund illegal activities:
“If this new channel will be used for these purposes, we have to act as act in response to other illegal operation,” he said.
Goldfine also warned individual investors who are considering investing in crypto-assets, the high risks of these investments.
“The volatility of this activity could increase significantly or decrease significantly, nobody can say for sure. If anyone is thinking of selling his house to buy cryptocurrency, I would say that the risk in this case would be enormous.”
Goldfine, supervising the ninth largest economy in the world, not for the first time expressed skepticism about the cryptocurrency. In December last year, he argued that bitcoin has all the faces of the “pyramid”, whose purpose is to buy the asset and then sell it at a higher price.
