Bitcoin as a commodity
The chair of the US Federal Reserve has acknowledged that Bitcoin is a store of value, just like gold. According to Jerome Powell, the cryptocurrency is far from achieving mass adoption, but people do use it as a store of value.
Powell, the sixteenth and current chairman of the US Federal Reserve, has weighed in on what’s perhaps one of the biggest discussions in the cryptocurrency community.
According to the highly-ranked official, Bitcoin is far from achieving mass adoption as a means of payment, but it is a store of value. The chairman even compared it directly to gold:
… We haven’t seen widespread adoption. Bitcoin is a good example. Really, almost no one uses Bitcoin for payments. They use it more as an alternative to gold, really. It’s a store of value, it’s a speculative store of value, like gold.
The Chairman of United States central bank when asked about Bitcoin:
“They use it as a store of value…like Gold….that’s not to say we won’t see it & if we do see it yes you could see a return to an era in the US when we had many different currencies…”
h/t @APompliano 🐂 pic.twitter.com/sgI7b1vDJg
— Luke Martin (@VentureCoinist) July 11, 2019
Interestingly enough, Powell’s comments constituted his answer to the question of whether or not the widespread adoption of cryptocurrencies would diminish or remove the need for a reserve currency.
Powell answered that while this hasn’t happened yet, “that’s not to say we won’t see it and if we do see it, yes, you could see a return to an era in the US when we had many different currencies…”
Just a few days ago, CryptoPotato reported on an interesting theory which had arisen in the cryptocurrency community. According to some, Facebook’s recently-announced Libra could become a global reserve currency.
We even saw some observers listing the necessary stages that the cryptocurrency will need to go through in order for that to happen.
And while many may have dismissed such a notion, hearing the chairman of the US Federal Reserve himself confirming that cryptocurrencies could, in theory, diminish the need for a reserve currency definitely makes a bullish case for crypto.