Bank for International Settlements: Bitcoin could get Internet to a full stupor if used at the scale of regular purchases

A new paper composed by the analytics from the Bank for International Settlements (Switzerland) describes an interesting theoretical scenario: Bitcoin becomes a number one payment tool on the Internet and used as often as the U.S. dollar - the network would not be ready for the millions of verification processes.

“The associated communication volumes could bring the Internet to a halt,” paper authors note.

This confirms the words of the Ripple Labs head about Bitcoin: its payment opportunities are far from ideal even if one wants to buy a cup of coffee - and here we are looking at a potential world where thousands of mundane goods are bought with Bitcoin online at the same time.

This also corresponds with the view of NASDAQ CEO Adena Friedman: right now, there is no digital currency able to serve as an Internet payment tool. This corporate leader doesn’t exclude the future emergence of Internet currency.

In contrast with the conclusions of the Bank for International Settlements, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey thinks that Bitcoin could become an Internet currency and even a single world currency.

Other notable points from the bank research include the notion about Bitcoin consuming too much energy - this can result in nothing less than “an environmental disaster”. This coincides with the older analyses on the topic.

Despite all this, the BIS sees benefits in the blockchain technology when used without Bitcoin - an unsurprising position considering the current work of financial institutions in the sphere of DLT.

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