The European Central Bank (ECB) is the central bank of the European Union countries which have adopted the euro. Our main task is to maintain price stability in the euro area and so preserve the purchasing power of the single currency.
www.ecb.europa.eu
Can anyone speak to this?
Gold and other precious metals is rarely used in transactions but gold and other precious metals are viewed as a means of warehousing wealth. If Bitcoin maintains that it too is a way of warehousing wealth, then Bitcoin is here to stay.
Moreover years ago I got into an argument with a goldbug (slang for those people who are perma-bulls for buying gold, gold, gold!) who claimed gold is money. I pushed back and told them gold isn't money! After all, if you tried to pay me with gold, how am I to assess the purity of the gold, or for that matter keep it in a safe place, or drag it along with me so I too could spend it on something?
If gold is money, it is among the most annoying kinds of money there is!
Meanwhile, Bitcoin always has a spot price and is easily transferred between parties and stored and carried around.
But only if we maintain faith that Bitcoin is valuable to some degree—which is what the article you linked to is pushing back against.
Unlike what the article says, the greatest threat to crypto is financial tech. With FinTech either we roll back to the wild west and each bank issues their own electronic currency (I shall call mine, EricBucks! smile) or each
Central Bank issues their own digital currency (I'll lobby the Federal Reserve that we call our digital dollar, EricBucks, 'cause why not? Smile)
The primary issue at stake is if a digital currency is adopted for consumerism, which one(s) shall it be? and right now we are definitely in the wild west with zillions of cryptos all vying to become one of if not the primary digital currency.
As an example, right now in the news we're watching Elon Musk starting to pick a fight in terms of free speech with Apple, who, behind the scenes threatened to remove Twitter from the App Store if Twitter tried to bypass the App Store with in-app purchases. Elon has made it plain that he wants to be able to
take $DOGE as payment and create a whole ecosystem of services within Twitter (thereby making Twitter truly into a digital town square), but Musk doesn't want to give Apple the 30% cut all Apps in the App Store currently give Apple. So Musk is slowly forming an anti-trust case against Apple.
Going forward we're going to see huge legal battles over currency platforms and so it is way, way too early to start making tombstones for Bitcoin and the like.