Researchers advise Bank of Israel to postpone launch of national cryptocurrency

Summary:

• A group under the Bank of Israel advises to postpone issuance of national cryptocurrency
• Researchers: Bitcoin mining is over three times more energy-consuming than gold mining
• Bitcoin (BITCOIN on xStation5) returns to previous consolidation area

Investors launched Friday’s trading on the cryptocurrency market in rather downbeat moods. Most of major cryptocurrencies have experienced moderate drops since midnight. Dash (DASH on xStation5) is among the biggest laggards after the cryptocurrency declined over 4%. The capitalization of the cryptocurrency market stands a notch below the $213 billion handle whereas Bitcoin, the most famous digital currency, holds 52.2% market share.

BITCOIN saw some losses in the past two days. Moreover, the cryptocurrency returned to the range of the consolidation started in mid-October. Source: xStation5

First of all, a group created under the Bank of Israel, the Israeli central bank, published a paper related to the idea of issuing a national virtual currency. According to the group’s report, the state digital currency may pose a couple of benefits. Among the advantages the team mentions in the report we can find a support for the system of payments as well as  a possibility of scaling down the shadow economy (it is harder to hide unreported transactions while transactions are settled virtually and could be supervised by the government). Nevertheless, the group stressed some disadvantages of such a measure - for example, the people may get concerned with limited privacy in case of governmental surveillance over cryptocurrency transactions. The team recommended to postpone the issuance of the state digital currency until other major central banks, such as US Fed or ECB, will do it. However, given current sentiment of those central banks towards cryptocurrencies it may never happen.

ETHEREUM, like many other major coins, experienced declines in the past hours. However, the scale can be described as moderate. The cryptocurrency with nearly $22B market capitalization took a dive of around 0.8% since midnight. However, it is still trading above the range of the previous consolidation seen over the second half of October. Source: xStation5

Secondly, let’s mention a report published by the well-known scientific journal called Nature. The group of scientists from the US-based Oak Ridge Institute researched the energy consumption related to the cryptocurrency mining activities. What’s interesting, researchers noted that the mining of the most popular cryptocurrency consumes above three times more the energy than mining of gold. The group researched that mining of Bitcoins worth $1 used 17 megajoules while the mining a $1 worth of gold consumed 5 megajoules of energy, based on the data from first half of 2016 to mid-2018.

RIPPLE, unlike its aforementioned peers, managed to produce a minor gain today. Source: xStation5

Last but not least, it is worth to mention that Da Fonghei, the founder of NEO (the popular cryptocurrency), remarked during the interview with 8BTC that blockchain and cryptocurrencies are extremely over-regulated. Moreover, Da Fonghei said blockchain cannot survive within the current regulatory frameworks of the financial systems. The opinion of the founder of NEO is quite interesting as it stands in contrary to common belief that the crypto industry is extremely under-regulated.