The European Central Bank (ECB) opened up about cryptocurrency and said it wouldn’t recognize it as an actual currency, according to reports. The bank also said it didn’t have any plans to put bitcoin into its reserves.
The bank was responding during a question and answer session it regularly does on Twitter, where it uses the hashtag #AskECB to field questions.
“Bitcoin is not a currency, it rather is an asset and it is very volatile,” Central Bank officials wrote, quoting Chief Economist Philip Lane. The statement underpins the bank’s ongoing icy stance on cryptocurrency in general.
Earlier this year, a report called “Crypto-Assets: Implications for financial stability, monetary policy, and payments and market infrastructures” concluded that cryptocurrency didn’t have much impact on the traditional economy as a whole.
Despite news from China and other countries that they may invest in cryptocurrencies of their own, the EU’s reserve bank is still opposed to the idea.
Some users pushed back against the EU’s stance.
“Bitcoin is money,” said Pierre Rochard, a software engineer known for his advocacy. Someone else highlighted the ECB’s inflation calculator ,which illustrated how the euro’s purchasing power has decreased in the past two decades. This, they said, was worse than the ups and downs that cryptocurrencies like bitcoin endure.
In other cryptocurrency news, digital currency exchange Coinbase recently announced that its Visa debit card is now available in six additional European countries.
The company debuted the card in the U.K. in April. At the time, Zeeshan Feroz, CEO of Coinbase U.K., said the Coinbase Card is funded by customers’ Coinbase crypto account balances, giving them the ability to pay in store and online with bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and other digital tokens.
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