The price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies fell on Tuesday, following a strong warning from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
“It’s an extremely inefficient way to conduct transactions and the amount of energy consumed in processing those transactions is impressive,” Yellen said in an interview with the New York Times ’Dealbook Monday afternoon. It is not the first time he has criticized cryptocurrency, which he said is often used for illegal transactions.
However, Yellen also said that digital currencies would probably stay here and that a “digital dollar” could serve as an easier payment system for many Americans who do not have such access.
The price of bitcoin BTCUSD,
it was down 14% to $ 47,891, a level it hadn’t seen in a week, but it’s still up 73% so far this year. Losses were not limited to bitcoin, with ether prices, the currency at the top of the ETHUSD ether,
platform, 20% discount and for XRP XRPUSD,
which is related to Ripple, 22% less.
The former president of the Federal Reserve has made it clear since he took over the Treasury that his department will closely examine Bitcoin, with possible regulation.
She’s just a “temporary stop in the game,” he said Stephen Innes, chief strategist in Axi global markets, in a note to clients. “In addition to the consortium’s huge interest in the Middle East in trading bitcoin ETFs on the Toronto Stock Exchange that needs to be physically hedged, but if companies start adding physical currencies to the balance sheet this year, this is the panacea that changes the game, ”he said.
Bitcoin recently surpassed the market value of $ 1 trillion for the first time, and the big moves seen this year have attracted more investors and interest from companies such as electric car maker Tesla TSLA,
which revealed earlier this month a $ 1.5 billion investment in bitcoin and plans to accept it as a payment in the future. And the credit card giant Mastercard MA,
he has also said it would allow merchants to accept some cryptocurrencies on their network later this year.
Read: Tesla bitcoin gambit already grossed $ 1 billion, a higher-than-2020 profit from car sales, according to analyst
But Bitcoin had a volatile start to the week, which fell on Monday in a move that some blamed on Tesla TSLA,
Chief Executive Elon Musk. Over the weekend, he tweeted that “BTC and ETH look very expensive” in response to Euro Pacific Capital chief executive Peter Schiff, who defended gold over bitcoin. “Gold is not BS. They are real money and better than both! ”
This back-and-forth between Musk and Schiff continued on Tuesday, and he criticized the electric car CEO’s bitcoin approach. Musk responded with an eggplant emoji, which some deduced was his way of rejecting the comment. These emojis were banned by the social networking group Facebook on their Instagram unit for phallic symbolism and food.