“The drama of bitcoin is that, in order for it to be more successful, and for it to be more widely accepted, anonymity has to be lost in a certain dimension.” So believes José De Gregorio, former president of the Central Bank of Chile. For the economist, the first cryptocurrency is a bubble that could last 1,000 years, but could also go to a price of zero dollars.
One of the questions of the now dean of the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Chile is that, in percentage terms, Bitcoin would not yet reflect a high number of transactions. The critic of the academic is that the crypto asset is already more than 12 years old and exhibits less than 1% of the total monetary transactions carried out on a global scale.
De Gregorio went further by suggesting that the dollar or euro, national currencies with which the price of BTC is registered, would be the fundamental currencies that are behind bitcoin. The dean’s point of view is that the so-called “Blockchain technology”, the digitization of payments and central bank digital currencies (CBDC) have progress and greater potential.
“Economists are deeply skeptical. We can make transactions with bitcoin, but the fundamental currency behind is another. A currency is something that fulfills three functions: a store of value, a unit of account and a means of payment ”, explained De Gregorio during his intervention in the cycle of talks“ Connected with Chile ”organized by the exchange Buda.com.
The fact that the global digitization of payments is minimizing fees for sending and receiving funds is something that the executive valued. However, this fact was not directly related to cryptocurrencies, but to the technological advances of fintech and the banks themselves.
Possible financial crimes with bitcoin
The main concern of the academic is that bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general have an “enormous capacity for tax evasion.” This aspect is considered as “unresolved” and that it is still a pending task in the universe of digital assets.
The aspect of possible tax evasions was not the only one mentioned by De Gregorio. He also questioned the fact that it is not guaranteed that the technology is not used for money laundering or terrorist financing. On these points, he indicated that, if the origin of the funds, then bitcoin would not enter the international financial system.
Like his fellow economists on a global scale, the interviewee reiterated that bitcoin has no intrinsic value, but paradoxically compared it to gold for the theme of digital scarcity. “I like to say that it is similar to gold because people know and trust that it will have that value,” said the researcher who sees BTC as an asset, but not as money or a means of payment.
In a previous edition of “Connected with Chile”, former Senator Felipe Harboe explained that banks were unfairly criminalizing cryptocurrencies. For the politician, financial institutions only seek to defend their business models and act as intermediaries, as reported in July by CriptoNoticias.
