Bitcoin and other crypto-currency prices tumbled on Tuesday after a sharp warning from Finance Minister Janet Yellen.
“This is an extremely inefficient way to execute transactions, and the amount of energy consumed in processing the transactions is staggering,” Yellen said in an interview with the New York Times’ Dealbook late Monday. This is not the first time she has criticized the cryptocurrency, which she says is often used for illegal transactions.
However, Yellen also said that digital currencies are likely to stay here and that a ‘digital dollar’ could serve as an easier payment system for many Americans who do not have that access.
The price of bitcoin BTCUSD,
last fell 14% to $ 47,891, a level it has not seen for about a week, but is still 73% higher so far this year. Losses were not limited to bitcoin, with prices of ether, the currency running on top of the ethereum ETHUSD,
platform, down by 20% and for XRP XRPUSD,
which is linked to Ripple, by 22%.
The former chair of the Federal Reserve has made it clear since her takeover of the treasury that her department will thoroughly investigate bitcoin, with possible regulation.
She is just a ‘temporary game stopper’, he said Stephen Innes, chief global market strategist at Axi, in a comment to clients. “Apart from the huge consortium interest in the Middle East in the bitcoin ETF trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange that has to be physically hedged, but if companies are going to add physical coins to the balance sheet this year, it is the miraculous miracle cure,” he said .
Bitcoin recently delivered a $ 1 billion market value for the first time, and major moves seen this year have attracted more investors and interest from companies such as electric car maker Tesla TSLA,
which unveiled a $ 1.5 billion investment in bitcoin earlier this month and plans to accept it as payment in the future. And the credit card giant Mastercard MA,
also said that traders will be able to accept a number of cryptocurrencies on their network later this year.
Read: Tesla bitcoin gambit has already earned $ 1 billion, more than 2020 profit from car sales, estimates analyst
But bitcoin had a volatile start to the week and fell Monday in a move that some blame Tesla TSLA,
CEO Elon Musk. Over the weekend, he tweeted that “BTC & ETH look very lol” in response to Euro Pacific Capital CEO Peter Schiff defending gold over bitcoin. ‘Gold is not BS. It’s real money and better than both! ”
This back and forth between Musk and Schiff continued on Tuesday, with the latter criticizing the bitcoin approach of the CEO of the electric car. Musk responded with an eggplant emoji, which some inferred was his way of dismissing the comment. That emoji was banned by the social media group Facebook on its Instagram unit due to phallic symbolism and food.