Thanks to the potential of visualizations produced by the cryptocurrency news – at a time when searches on Google are starting again as a result of the price – CNBC has proposed an old workhorse of anti-crypto communication by Joseph Stiglitz.
Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel-Prize winning economist, says cryptocurrencies should be shut down. Here's why. https://t.co/1RTW8pORhm pic.twitter.com/lwSqLhe4Mr
— CNBC (@CNBC) February 1, 2020
Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, said in 2019 that cryptocurrencies should be blocked, worrying that they might allow illegal activities by making monetary transactions less transparent.
However, he saw value in digital payment systems and supported the electronic use of government-backed currencies such as the dollar.
“I’ve been a great advocate of moving to an electronic payments mechanism. There are a lot of efficiencies. I think we can actually have a better regulated economy if we had all the data in real time, knowing what people are spending”.
Not just Bitcoin anymore: now the problem is cryptocurrency
The Stiglitz video on Twitter from CNBC looks more like an advertisement than a warning. It’s well packaged and is an eye-catching promotion dedicated to the peculiarities of the dollar against the cryptocurrency demon.
Stability, transparency and social control are the key to success for this economy says the Nobel Prize.
The message is clear and always points in the same direction: cryptocurrencies are used for recycling, the black market and the Dark Web.
The year was 2017 when his first interventions began to make themselves felt. In November of the year, inflamed by the dizzying rise in prices, his claims against Bitcoin thundered on Bloomberg.
And again in July 2018 at the Financial News :
“If you open up a hole like bitcoin, then all the nefarious activity will go through that hole, and no government can allow that.”
The interests at stake
When we look at this market we cannot help but catch a glimpse of the dawn of a new Asset Class.
It is no coincidence that the great appeals to political interventionism against the emerging cryptocurrency lobbies come from prominent figures of the traditional financial system closely linked to the banking sector and institutional interests.
The honours received by the system they defend are proof of this.
The emergence of an alternative capable of questioning the power of the elite is a symptom of an imminent danger for those at the helm of the contemporary financial Titanic. By its nature the clash will be necessary.
The instruments capable of freeing from centralized control important functions such as money, place the power games on a completely different ground. They will certainly be hampered by the establishment.
Awareness and information
The confusion that reigns outside the niche market in which the information related to the blockchain circulates is the cause of strong misunderstandings about the ecosystem.
The peculiarities of bitcoin as a valid instrument for money laundering and criminal use of money are still a myth, even if largely debunked by the technological reality that demonstrates exactly the characteristics of maximum traceability and transparency.
There will come a maturation of the sector where what now outside seems a homogeneous conglomerate of technologies and objectives will be observed as a universe of completely different projects and often competing with each other for vision, model and basic principles.
The asymmetry of information, of which the Nobel Prize winner, the protagonist of the article, is a scholar, is a condition in which information is not fully shared among the individuals involved in the economic process: therefore, some of the agents involved have more information than the rest of the participants and can take advantage of this configuration.
Information is power and the blockchain is a technology that deals with managing information in a different way. Guess who might not like it.
