Climate, bubbles, money laundering: In the last few weeks, the media has again been critical of Bitcoin. We take a look at some articles that boil down the usual accusations against our favorite currency.

Is it starting now? Is the moment starting now that everyone was waiting for, but no one really wanted to reach?

The media, politicians, and fund managers have been murmuring against Bitcoin since 2011. In doing so, they were reliably wrong, and the Bitcoiners, who sometimes quietly and sometimes loudly contradicted them, were right. But this time — this time, it will certainly be different. This time, the media, politicians, and fund managers will surely be right in saying the same things they have been saying since 2011.

But from the beginning and in all breadth: The last one to two weeks have once again washed up one or the other article agitating against Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Such articles usually appear in waves, and especially when the price is doing capers, it is good that such articles warn people not to burn money uninformed.

The arguments have always been the same. But something has changed, it seems to me. In the past, such articles liked to drip with ridicule, small talk, belittlement. Today they reek of something else — of outrage, anger, and rage, maybe even fear.

Among the apocalyptic horsemen leading Bitcoin opponents by the reins, climate change is at the forefront. The Süddeutsche Zeitung rises on this very one to demand that the world please tax Bitcoin.

The argument is not too complicated: Bitcoin has gained immensely in value, but this “alone does not make Bitcoin a success story.” Because nothing has changed in terms of the technical weaknesses, which the author puts in a nutshell, not entirely wrong and not entirely right, but very concisely: “The higher the market value, the higher the power consumption.” In the meantime, Bitcoin consumes more electricity than Sweden; indeed, a single transaction consumes as much as a single household — in an entire year. The comparison may be nonsensical, but it sounds impressive.

And all this when you can’t do “much more” with Bitcoin than hoard the coins. The cryptocurrency, Süddeutsche explains, is “moving on a collision course with all efforts to limit climate change.” While Bitcoin currently consumes only 0.6 percent of the electricity produced worldwide, the author concedes — and one would add, without even talking about agriculture with its methane-farting cattle, that electricity doesn’t even account for one-sixth of global energy consumption — “this figure can rise quickly,” the Süddeutsche predicts. So even if there is no real need for action yet, but at best a symbolic one, something urgently needs to be done!

Another problem with Bitcoin is that the miners also have an endless hunger for microchips, but the factories in Asia can only produce limited amounts. As a result, chips from Chinese factories end up in Chinese mining farms, converting hydroelectric power into Bitcoins. In contrast, not enough chips remain shipped across oceans and installed in German electric cars to consume Germany’s mix of wind and coal power. Mining is not only driving up electricity consumption. It is also ruining the mobility revolution by those corporations that are perhaps more to blame than anyone else for the current problems.

The miners could, the author suggests, switch Bitcoin to more environmentally friendly methods. He, of course, does not mean the common practice of feeding the systems through renewable energy. Still, probably a change in the consensus algorithm solves the problem fundamentally. Because miners won’t — or can’t — do this voluntarily because of sheer greed for profit, he wants to give them “a good kick in the right direction” — through taxes.

Taxes on mining, taxes on the exchange of Bitcoins, taxes on the production of mining equipment, taxes on its import: In this way, the state can “invest some of the exorbitant profits in more sensible things.” However, the author does not reveal to the curious reader which sensible things China is supposed to pay for with the resulting tax revenues — the yield in Germany will hardly be worth mentioning.

At least the Münchner Zeitung acknowledges that a purely German approach would have little effect and demands that the world proceeds in concert.

The unrestricted classic of Bitcoin FUD is the comparison with tulip bulbs and other objects of speculative bubbles. This is the program the press has been dishing out to us with nice regularity since 2013, but without the horrendous losses, we were predicted ever coming true.

After the media mostly disgraced themselves with the catastrophe forecasts, the bubble rider has hardly been ventured out of his stable lately. But Manager Magazin shows the courage to saddle the old horse once again. His hour must come sometime!

The wildly fluctuating prices — which jumped to $65,000 in April, fell to below $50,000, and then rose again to nearly $60,000 — are a crystal-clear sign, the magazine knows, that Bitcoin “is no good for a solid investment.”
The price development three years ago could “in retrospect be seen as a prime example of a speculative bubble that was initially pumped up and then burst,” the magazine explains to its readers. In case one or the other of them is annoyed about not having invested three years ago at the peak of the bubble at around 14,000 euros, the magazine can reassure: “There are many indications that the same thing is currently repeating itself on the crypto market.” So there will be another bubble if we do not misunderstand.
Then the author compares the bitcoin bubble to the dot-com bubble. Most comparisons are lame, and so is this one, for instance, when he ignores that bitcoin has already had four to five bubbles in the period in which dot-com stocks have recovered — at least 10 years — and that the losses from each of them corrected into a hefty plus after three years at the latest. While the first telecom bubble victims are still down about 80 percent, the “victims” of the first bitcoin bubble, those who bought at 20 euros in June 2011, are now up by a factor we don’t even want to talk about.

To get the limping comparison off the ground, the article takes out the dead blow hammer that we already know from the Süddeutsche in a different guise: Bitcoin has no real value at all! Behind all those Internet shares that were trend-setters 20 years ago, such as the “people’s share” Telekom or Pets.com, there were “at least still companies with business models” that could “at least theoretically justify even strong price increases.”

With cryptocurrencies, on the other hand — no trace of such potential, no matter how hard you look! “Even a close look” reveals “no substantial value,” knows the author, who has obviously looked more closely than the millions of market players who, in their boundless blindness, are currently valuing Bitcoin so highly. If reality doesn’t fit the theory, then reality must be wrong!
And because the wrong reality will eventually revert to the right theory, it is clear what will happen: The bubble will burst. The question is not if, but when.

So far, we have had two journalists*s who think they know better than Bitcoiners and the markets even when their guild has been about 100 percent wrong in the past.

Third, we now have a fund manager who feels called to lead the third apocalyptic horseman into battle in an interview with WELT AM SONNTAG: Money laundering.

According to WELT, Klaus Kaldemorgen is a “star investor” who works for DWS, a Deutsche Bank subsidiary. Given this domicile, Kaldemorgen should know what he’s talking about. After all, his parent company knows how to produce tangible and large-caliber money laundering scandals.

So while German financial regulator BaFin is currently demanding stricter anti-money laundering measures from Deutsche Bank, star investor Kaldemorgen is demanding stricter measures against cryptocurrencies BaFin. It’s only fair. One hand washes — you know what: It is unacceptable, Kaldemorgen tells the WELT, “that a loophole opens up in our otherwise so regulated economy where money laundering can take place with impunity and without being detected.”

Moreover, Kaldemorgen complains that no one knows who owns how many Bitcoins, making the markets vulnerable to manipulation. Once again, the image of the stake stuck in the eye of the person who wants to pull the splinter out of the finger of others comes to mind. However, Kaldemorgen is optimistic that governments worldwide will soon tighten the screws — if only because this potentially promises tax revenues of no small amount.

WirtschaftsWoche recently sounded the same horn. Although the magazine demonstrates more competence in terms of content, it freely refrains from letting the message, which had already been decided beforehand, become clouded.

Bitcoin is “still firmly anchored in the dirty corners of the financial world,” the author states. This is evidenced, for example, by the fact that Bitcoin briefly fell by 15 percent just at the time Joe Biden announced that he would take tougher action against money laundering in the future. No further questions, Your Honor!

Because trading is “largely anonymous,” Bitcoin is repeatedly at the center of criminal activities, such as ransomware, the article explains. It is to the author’s credit, quite unironically, that she does not close her eyes to the other side: She notes that Bitcoin is extremely transparent and that, according to Chainalysis, “just 0.34 percent of the total value of all crypto transactions” was used for illegal purposes — and that the share of the dollar is almost six times higher at two percent.

As a reader, one now fears the article would take a turn at this point, similar to the one former CIA Director Michael Morell took to say with him that Bitcoin was the worst ecosystem for criminals imaginable and that a switch from dollars to Bitcoin could eradicate numerous crimes. And while you scroll up one more time to check if you missed the question mark in the headline “Bitcoin remains dirty,” — meanwhile, the author concludes her article completely unmoved by this gaping contradiction.

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Source: https://l-wiesflecker.medium.com/climate-bubbles-and-money-laundering-bitcoin-in-critic-d2b1068c393c?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency