Haruhiko Kuroda, the governor of the Bank of Japan (BoJ), expressed his strong reservations about bitcoin in an interview with Bloomberg agency published on Friday, as did other leaders of large central banks recently.
“The bulk of trading is speculative and the volatility is extremely high,” Kuroda said in this interview. Bitcoin is “hardly used as a means of payment,” he further noted.
Before the BoJ, the US Federal Reserve (Fed), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England have already recently warned investors against bitcoin, which rose in mid-April to an all-time high of nearly $ 65,000 but which then experienced a dizzying drop, while remaining up from the start of the year.
Bitcoin, which fell back to around $ 36,800 on Friday, has suffered in recent weeks from the about-face of Tesla boss Elon Musk, who announced in mid-May that his company would now refuse bitcoin payments in the face of environmental risk. generated by this energy-hungry cryptocurrency.
Beijing then dealt bitcoin a further blow by reaffirming its ban on cryptocurrencies. But China continues to prepare its own digital currency, supervised by the country’s Central Bank and which could be launched on a large scale as early as 2022.
The Bank of Japan itself initiated technical tests at the beginning of April on its own developing digital currency, an experiment which is to last a year. The Fed, the ECB and the Bank of England also have similar projects.
