the next tacit strategy of central banks against Bitcoin
By the beginning of September 2019, the European Central Bank (ECB), headed by its novel president Christine Lagarde, made an unprecedented announcement. For the first time ever, an important central bank will consider “climate change risk” and will put “protection of the environment at the core of their understanding of their mission”. For dissipating any doubts, Lagarde reinforced that “their primary mandate is price stability, of course, but it has to be embedded that climate change and environmental risk are mission critical”.
In the actual context of worldwide concerns about climate change, ECB’s proposition sounds quite adequate and of course so politically correct, but some questions about such a startling statement may arise. Why a central bank is revising its economic policies as to consider climate change risks? What do they mean with that and how they will accomplish that “mission”? A central bank is not supposed to focus just on the monetary affairs of a country?
Why a central bank suddenly worries about climate change? When someone worries about something it is because there are irrational interests (such as love, grief, pain,…) or because there are rational interests involved. If you, care reader, the same as me, honestly doubt that central banks do care about climate at all, there is only one reason remaining.
But what would be those rational ECB’s interests? Definitely the same of all species in Nature: to survive and to maintain its supremacy. And which is the main hazard that ECB (and all central banks in general) is facing in the near future? For sure, it is not climate change, but cryptocurrencies in general, particularly Bitcoin.
However, what has to do these sudden ECB’s climate change concerns with bitcoin? The reason is that bitcoin can be easily sold as a ‘climate destroyer’ as for it to be mined a very large amount of energy (that heats the environment) is needed. The amount of energy used (or the entropy caused) for creating a bitcoin is certainly less than the amount of energy needed to maintain all central, private and public banks worldwide, but this fact, logically, will be omitted.
But why not explicitly admits that the real hazard for countries is bitcoin rather than climate change? Well, they have already tried that with the Libra project. In fact, many ‘public’ institutions, governments mostly, have already declared explicitly that Libra, and implicitly Bitcoin, represents a threat to finance stability, but they have realized that this weeping only increases cryptocurrencies adoption among people. This direct strategy turned in fact unsuccessful. Certainly, you cannot win a fight when someone who is more adapted to Nature than you. In this case it is better to withdraw and to think about a better strategy.
“What if we put someone to fight for us instead? This way we would be less exposed and therefore we’ll suffer less deterioration.” The ECB has already prepared this new tacit strategy behind the scene and certainly more central banks will join afterwards. As they cannot win this war of finance directly fighting face to face, they are firstly using demagogy, such as publicly showing grief and sorrow regarding climate change, this with the aim of gaining strong supporters. Secondly, when all central banks be called up to war they are probably going to use the media massively for devastating proof-of-work cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin, blaming them for global warming. And finally, once the seeds were planted, they are going to set aside and let all the climate change soldiers do the rest of the work for them.
Morally, Bitcoin won one important battle against the world’s finance tyranny during the Libra’s project hearings. However, the next battle that bitcoin will probably has to face will be against the people themselves, the same people for what Bitcoin was created to get them free. This next battle will be between bitcoin believers and bitcoin misguided haters. People against people, as politics have always wished and achieved along history. This next battle will be between rationalism and irrationalism, between awareness and ignorance. The survival and success of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies will depend on this next battle we are likely heading to. The pieces are already set up on the table in this fight for supremacy. Only one will be the winner. Let’s see who is the final one.
Published at Tue, 28 Jan 2020 17:12:35 +0000
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