Should Bitcoin and Its Brothers Be Considered as Voluntary Currencies?

“If we want to keep cryptocurrencies alive, we must specify the rules of coexistence and above all the rules of their mathematical mechanisms”. This is the invitation formulated by the president of Consob, Paolo Savona who spoke at the Option of Next conference, pointing out how “today we find ourselves in the need to stop and resolve a situation that has also been allowed by the authorities”. “Mine is in a certain sense also a self-criticism, even if from my first report I immediately said that money must be public, otherwise we are faced with a problem of altering the monetary and financial institutional system”. For Savona, in fact, cryptocurrencies risk “altering the functioning of both the financial market and democracy: we are facing a form of counterfeiting of the sovereign currency which instead meets the needs of protecting democracy and savings”. This is because “Cryptocurrencies neutralize the principle of independence of central banks, which by printing money protect citizens from unfair taxes”. Savona recalled “In some systems, such as in England, bank customers are transforming deposits of pounds or other currencies into cryptocurrency: but at this point, the system breaks down because the two currencies cannot coexist.” registering in the United Kingdom in the rush of savers to withdraw their deposits from their banks to go and invest in cryptocurrencies, attracted by the rapid growth of prices. A phenomenon that the Bank of England is trying to stem also by putting cryptocurrencies under its attention by monitoring the prospects of threat to financial stability. The UK was, for example, one of the countries that took resolute action against Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, effectively banning it. The British financial supervisory authority has ruled that the company will no longer be able to carry out any business in the country, also producing warnings aimed at consumers to warn them to be wary of all those advertisements that guarantee high returns on investments in electronic currency. The Financial Conduct Authority specifically stated that Binance Markets Ltd “must not, without FCA’s prior written consent, carry out any business” in the UK. Savona’s conclusion is that the only possible solution at this time is to “say that the only legal currency is the official currency ”, that is the currency“ which protects the saver and the democracies, while the others are voluntary currencies ”.