Talking amid a meet at the 2018 Canada FinTech Gathering in Montreal, Yellen – who rose to popularity within the cryptocurrency community last year as the target of the presently scandalous ‘Buy Bitcoin’ session at a House Financial Services Committee meeting – doubled down on her earlier opinion about the crypto currency.
Yellen said “It has long been thought that for something to be a useful currency, it needs to be a stable source of value, and bitcoin is anything but.”
Highlighting Bitcoin’s disadvantages, she said
“It’s not used for a lot of transactions, it’s not a stable source of value, and it’s not an efficient means of processing payments. It’s very slow in handling payments. It has difficulty because of its very decentralized nature.”
Having been in attendance during Yellen’s discourse, Satoshi Portal CEO Francis Pouliot was among the first to condemn her opinion on social media. “The Official NPC [non-player character] guidelines to Bitcoin FUD, courtesy of the FED.”
At a press conference in December last year, Yellen also called Bitcoin a “highly speculative asset” and “not a stable source of value.” She also noted that the Fed did not at that time “seriously consider” the idea of a government- backed crypto currency.
Yellen’s speech also echoes the comments made earlier in October by economist Nouriel Roubini, an outspoken crypto critic who anticipates a total collapse of the entire crypto sector.
Commentators have questioned Roubini regarding his remarks. Crypto enthusiasts believe that Roubini’s lack of understanding of the decentralized crypto currency has driven him, similar to Yellen, to draw fake conclusions about its resilience.
During an appearance at BlockShow Americas in August, Roubini said, “I can see a bubble when there is one – and to me, this entire space has been the mother and the father of all financial bubbles and now it’s [going to] burst.”