[2021-02-23] Yellen sounds warning about ‘extremely inefficient’ bitcoin

[orions.belt19]

Key points:

• Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Monday warned that bitcoin is an “extremely inefficient” way to conduct monetary transactions.
  
• She spoke as the cryptocurrency’s price tumbled in morning trading, but remained above $53,000.

“I don’t think that bitcoin … is widely used as a transaction mechanism,” she told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin at a New York Times DealBook conference. “To the extent it is used I fear it’s often for illicit finance. It’s an extremely inefficient way of conducting transactions, and the amount of energy that’s consumed in processing those transactions is staggering.”

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/22/yellen-sounds-warning-about-extremely-inefficient-bitcoin.html

To say that people buying bitcoin as a transaction mechanism is ridiculous but to say that it is used for illicit finance is even more ridiculous.

[Vishnu.Reang]

Yellen seems to be butt hurt about the Bitcoin guy who photobombed her a few days back. And regarding the efficiency of Bitcoin with regards to conducting transactions, there are both positives and negatives. Positives include the ease at which Bitcoin can be transacted across the international borders, added anonymity and low transaction fee for high volume transactions. Now talking about what Yellen mentioned, scalability is the biggest issue that is regarded as one of the drawbacks.

But usage of Bitcoin is out of personal choice. People are using Bitcoin, because they don't trust fiat currency. Whether it is efficient or inefficient doesn't make much impact on the choice. When trillions worth of US Dollar banknotes are printed without any limit, citizens are concerned about how to protect their wealth.

[acquafredda]

Yellen's agenda towards bitcoin is right now very clear. Every time she publicly speaks about she tend to remind the public that bitcoin is used mostly in illicit ways and today she is adding spice to the recipe saying that it is also an inefficient transactional network.
All good, let her talk.

[BurtW]

Establishment talking points:

Bitcoin is "used for illegal activities"
Bitcoin is "not green"
Bitcoin is "risky"
Bitcoin is "volatile"
Bitcoin is "a bubble"

etc. etc.

They will be spouting these and others more and more as they see people moving away from their currencies as a store of value and embracing something else.

Bitcoin is not a threat to the utility of fiat currencies.  We need them for day to day transactions.

Bitcoin is a threat to their control of the economy through their manipulation of their currencies.

[20kevin20]

Translation: "We are still desperately scared about Bitcoin's existence and we're taking our last few possible steps to try our best to make people focus on anything else but what we can't control".

I'd bet a grand at least 5% of every government and authority owns cryptocurrencies. They're decades ahead of us with the tech behind the scenes and they know this is uncontrollable.

[bittraffic]

She could consider Bitcoin transactions as extremely inefficient, you could really be wondering how they come up with it if she just compares it to the current system transactions. We have heard of this kind of warning before, they are telling it over and over again but this time she made sure, its timing where the market is doing a correction. This is more like a Fud.

[hv_]

Sure, if max volumes coming from ... oh

https://amycastor.com/2021/02/23/ny-ag-tether-bitfinex-settlement-reveals-commingling-of-funds-years-of-shenanigans/

[cr1776]

• Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Monday warned that bitcoin is an “extremely inefficient” way to conduct monetary transactions.
  
• She spoke as the cryptocurrency’s price tumbled in morning trading, but remained above $53,000.

...

"Efficiency" is a term that requires that one first define what one wants to accomplish.  If the goal is to have a hidden 2-200% tax on people so that you can enrich and empower yourself and your cronies, then fiat is certainly efficient.  If your goal is to destabilize governments and countries by not having an objective standard of value, then fiat is efficient.  If your goal is to maintain power over everyone alive by controlling their money supply, then fiat is definitely efficient.  If your goal is slow, reversible transactions (months for credit cards), then fiat credit cards are quite efficient.  If your goal is to undermine liberty, the fiat is quite efficient. If your goal is to shuffle bills around in armored trucks, and allow some control-freak bureaucrats to control the supply, then it is efficient.  If your goal is to require huge vaults, printing presses, special paper, and all kinds of other things, fiat is extremely efficient.

Alternatively, if your is to protect yourself from confiscation, protect yourself from inflation, protect your privacy (more so with taproot and other privacy improvements), and in general provide an avenue for liberty worldwide, then bitcoin is extremely efficient.

In short, Yellen has motives that do not involve liberty or freedom, but involve power and control.

Next it will be: think of the children, watch out for extremists etc.

[DapanasFruit]

I agree with this woman on only two well-known points. One, Bitcoin is really inefficient in terms of how speed a transaction can be done at least compared to Visa or Mastercard and there can be a problem with network congestion plus increasing confirmation fees at a time when there is a big volume of transactions - these are the things that Bitcoin has to improve a lot. However, people are using Bitcoin not really as a money but as a store of value like the physical gold so maybe for now there is no major issue here. Two, the mining of Bitcoin is costing us a big chunk of energy, so there is a big challenge to find an alternative technology that can lower the power requirement. I am looking at Bitcoin as a work in progress therefore we should be prodding developers to be more creative and use their ingenuity to make Bitcoin more modern and more efficient.

[bryant.coleman]

Despite all the scaremongering.. Bitcoin continues to trade above the $50,000 level. Rather than attacking Bitcoin all the time, Yellen and the rest of the reptilian overlords must think about the falling purchasing power of the US Dollar. They should analyze why people are not preferring the USD to store their wealth. I am still waiting to see how the latest $1.9 trillion stimulus is going to turn out. Let's see what impact it is going to have on inflation.

[Kakmakr]

A women scorned..... Read this ----> https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/12/someone-held-up-a-buy-bitcoin-sign-during-yellens-testimony-to-congress.html

Janet Yellen will never forget this embarrassment on national television and revenge is clearly on her agenda now... It is such a pity that petty things like this can come in the way of progressive technology.

She will never support Bitcoin and she is also old school (Fiat slave) ... so even if this event never happened, she would still not be in favor of Crypto currencies. (A puppet placed in that position to serve the Fiat Puppet masters)  

[Lucius]

Kakmakr, it’s amazing that someone just shows up literally half a meter away from some high-ranking official and does something like this - so hasn’t anyone learned anything from the lesson “how Congress is occupied” in a country boasting of having a top level of security at all levels?

I have to admit that when I first saw the picture, it seemed to me that someone was playing with photoshop - because I’m almost certain I’ve seen that person somewhere before - but the whole thing is actually completely real because there’s a video of the whole event.


Some may have thought that some things would change with the arrival of the Biden administration, but some things have their continuity, no matter who was in the White House. People are appointed to positions because of their attitudes toward someone or something, and this lady deserved her chair because of her attitude toward cryptocurrencies. I find it very indicative that in a very short time she was commented on the topic of Bitcoin several times, which was definitely not the case during the previous administration.

[davis196]

Let's print paper Bitcoins and begin exchanging them offline.The energy costs will be zero,so fiat bankers like Janet Yellen and all the Bitcoin haters will stop whining about energy consumption and "transaction inefficiency".
Fiat paper money fans love paper money,so I guess that they will shut up,if we turn Bitcoin into paper money.
They won't shut up about illicit finance and BTC being used for illegal stuff,so I can't find a solution about this problem.

[IconFirm]

Just had to post this. Between fits of deep belly laughter.

Just days after this felon Yellen states that bitcoin is “extremely inefficient” - the entire federal reserve payments platform goes down:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9296385/Entire-Federal-Reserve-payment-CRASHES.html

Oh the irony. Karma's a bitch eh?

Anyone notice Bitcoin payments crash lately? No? LULZ

[Lucius]

Just days after this felon Yellen states that bitcoin is “extremely inefficient” - the entire federal reserve payments platform goes down

We seem to have real Bitcoin believers in some key places - first that young man appears behind Yellen with the sign "Buy Bitcoin", and then the whole payment platform crashes for as long as 3 hours. Someone can call it "operational error", but I would say that someone is sending a very clear message - I just hope that for this case they will not blame North Korea or Iran as the culprits on duty for all the problems in the world.

[cr1776]

I agree with this woman on only two well-known points. One, Bitcoin is really inefficient in terms of how speed a transaction can be done at least compared to Visa or Mastercard and there can be a problem with network congestion plus increasing confirmation fees at a time when there is a big volume of transactions - these are the things that Bitcoin has to improve a lot. However, people are using Bitcoin not really as a money but as a store of value like the physical gold so maybe for now there is no major issue here. Two, the mining of Bitcoin is costing us a big chunk of energy, so there is a big challenge to find an alternative technology that can lower the power requirement. I am looking at Bitcoin as a work in progress therefore we should be prodding developers to be more creative and use their ingenuity to make Bitcoin more modern and more efficient.

For the two "well-known" points, I would have to disagree that they may be "well-known" but not necessarily accurate.

First as far as the power consumption goes, one really needs to compare bitcoin's power consumption with the entire fiat ecosystem world wide, from the banks, branches, trucks to move fiat around, printing, paper, design, security, human cost in the ability of the power-hungry to skim off 3-300% of the value of everyone's assets every year, the millions of computers running at every place that handles fiat etc.  So it is debatable which would be more power efficient.

Second, you need to clearly define this:
"...how speed a transaction can be done at least compared to Visa or Mastercard..."

Because if you truly mean "done" as in "completed" then bitcoin is many orders of magnitude faster since Visa and Mastercard can be reversed for months.  Bitcoin reversed for, perhaps an a few hours if one got extremely lucky.  If you mean "done" as in the transaction is started, then bitcoin and Visa/MC are fast and give the illusion of a transaction being "completed" when in reality it is similar to it being in the mempool.  Lightning and other second level  can make things significantly faster from a "initial confirmation" perspective and from an irreversibility perspective giving you both the confidence that it will instantly (1 -2 seconds) become locked in.  Lightning is more akin to handing someone cash or having an irreversible credit card. 

:-)

[DooMAD]

But surely, if it was "extremely inefficient", it wouldn't need "curtailing"?  I mean... which is it?   

[stompix]

I told a lot of people who were cheering thinking the new democrat wave will be "good for bitcoin" that it might now be the case and slowly, step by step the new people in charge seem to be the worse, and one single event that a probably most of us are unaware or don't give a damn might trigger something really really bad.

Yellen has already mentioned bitcoin a number of times and accused it of being a tool if terrorist and criminals, there was a release by the DOJ on how North Korea is financing its nuclear program with cryptocurrency,  and the little snowball I was talking about:

During the January 6th, 2021, storming of the United States Capitol, your platform live streamed a number of individuals who entered and were around the building. Several of these individuals earned thousands of dollars in DLive’s digital currency that day, and a number received large donations through the platform ahead of the event.

And here is the effect:
https://financialservices.house.gov/uploadedfiles/hhrg-117-ba10-wstate-brooksl-20210225.pdf

Far-right extremists have seized upon new technologies – especially encrypted, decentralized, and peer-to-peer
services – to organize, spread propaganda, and recruit new members.
<>
Another example of how decentralization is changing hate group financing is the continued proliferation of cryptocurrencies, and changes in behavior when using
cryptocurrencies. Not only are groups and individuals involved in the hate landscape readily adopting cryptocurrencies, but they are implementing techniques to use cryptocurrencies covertly.

Once they've started with the terrorism and far-right extremist narrative nothing good will come out of it.

[malevolent]

All studies show Bitcoin is barely used for crime at all, same goes for mixer traffic, and yet they keep spewing this BS. Doesn't take a genius that they're preparing the ground for the introduction of some draconian measures when the time is the most convenient, perhaps after some high-profile criminal gets connected to some BTC transaction, or under similar circumstances.

[cr1776]

All studies show Bitcoin is barely used for crime at all, same goes for mixer traffic, and yet they keep spewing this BS. Doesn't take a genius that they're preparing the ground for the introduction of some draconian measures when the time is the most convenient, perhaps after some high-profile criminal gets connected to some BTC transaction, or under similar circumstances.

Exactly.  Yellen knows the threat that bitcoin poses to fiat and consequently to the Federal Reserve.  All the statists know it and know it will then threaten their hegemony in many areas.