Israel’s economics “tsar” Avi Simhon has denounced Bitcoin (BTC) as intrinsically inefficient, predicting that the cryptocurrency will therefore disappear.
A Cointelegraph correspondent reported that Simhon — the head of the National Economic Council and senior economic policy advisor to the country’s prime minister — made his remarks at Israel Bitcoin Summit at Tel Aviv University on Jan. 8.
Simhon argued that to issue Bitcoin at a national or global scale would cost “trillions of dollars of actual cost in energy,” as opposed to the existing state of affairs in which printing fiat money costs very little. This, he stated, is what prevents the invention from serving as a currency.
“I am still quite confident that money as we know it will change,” he said — yet made it clear that this shift to digital currencies would not be due to the decentralized, anonymous peer-to-peer model of Bitcoin, but rather to a central-bank backed digital currency (CBDC).
Eulogy made by Avi Simhon
