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While countries such as El Salvador are making Bitcoin legal tender, in the US, Senator Elizabeth Warren is speaking out against BTC.
During a debate, she listed all the problems with cryptocurrencies and BTC, also talking about instability, criminal uses, cyber-attacks and then talked about the negative consequences on the environment. She stated:
“Bitcoin consumes more energy than entire countries and it is projected to consume as much energy as all the data centers in the whole world this year. One bitcoin transaction, a single purchase, sale or transfer, uses the same amount of electricity as the typical US household uses in more than a month”.
Little use was made of the explanations of a counterpart who argued that the energy expenditure is necessary to maintain network security.
Her view is that a CBDC that consumes less energy than Bitcoin would be better. Therefore, she concludes:
“Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are terrible for the environment. One of the easiest and least disruptive things we can do to address the climate crisis is crack down on environmentally wasteful cryptocurrencies, and now is the time to do it.”
Elizabeth Warren: Bitcoin is the Wild West
To Bloomberg she added:
“What is happening right now in cryptocurrency, Bitcoin and Dogecoin, it’s a wild west out there and it makes not a good way to buy and sell things and not a good investment and an environmental disaster. So do we need some more regulation around this? You bet we do”.
Speaking of regulation, the senator adds that those who buy Bitcoin for speculation do so while taking risks. This is what distinguishes BTC from the stock market, where investors are protected by existing regulation against the risks of pumps and dumps. According to her, however, regulators and the US Congress itself are lagging behind and it is necessary to understand where cryptocurrencies are going.
She also hinted that creating a digital version of the dollar would actually serve the purpose of combating what China is doing and that most transactions are already digital at the moment.
The difference between China and the US, she said, is also that China’s CBDC would be a means to control transactions. The US does not intend to go that far.
At the moment, she concludes, we are still a long way from issuing a digital dollar, all this while cryptocurrencies are literally “sweeping the earth”.