zerohedge.com / By Tyler Durden / January 28, 2013, 15:15
That precious metals are not the best friends of central banks, whose sole provenance is in creating, and lately massively diluting, faith-based fiat currency is no secret, especially not after the recent snafu involving the Bundesbank and its shocking gold repatriation announcement which came in direct refutation of its public statements just 2 months earlier about faith in the NY Fed this, and bashing of a “phantom debate” on the safety of gold reserves that. Yet it was not gold gold, silver or even tungsten that was the object of derision in an amusing paper released by the ECB in early November titled “Virtual Currency Schemes”, which we profiled at the time, but rather the decentralized electronic currency BitCoin, which was supposed to highlight what, in the eyes of the Draghi-led Frankfurt institutions, is nothing but a Ponzi scheme.
Why the ECB suddenly felt threatened so much by Bitcoin, it felt an imperative to issue a 55 page paper decrying such electronic currencies we will never know. What we do know, however, courtesy of a reminder by Bloomberg’s Max Raskin, is that since the publication of said paper, the value of Bitcoin as tracked by the Mtgox exchange, has soared some 40% in just under three months, from a “fiat equivalent value” of $13 to a most recent closing price of $18.50, and has doubled in the past 12 months alone.
So one wonders: after soaring to an all time high of $30 before crashing concurrent with the epic May 1, 2011 takedown of silver, was none other than the European Central Bank responsible for the recent second coming of BitCoin which is now slowly but surely creeping back to its all time highs, and what happens to all alternative “virtual” currencies once BitCoin returns to all time highs: will the Fed, the ECB, and the BIS have their hands full with pushing gold lower to care too much about this electronic currency, or will their attention then be diverted away from the daily precious metals smackdown to focus on this threat that at least in Europe is so large, the ECB itself had to chime in?
Pingback: payday loans fargo nd