European Central Bank (ECB) policymaker Ardo Hansson has labelled Bitcoin a “complete load of nonsense,” while claiming that the “crypto bubble has already started to collapse.”
Hansson’s scathing comments on cryptocurrency come after a woeful year for the digital asset class, with a large number of altcoins losing more than 90% of their value over the course of 2018.
During a conference in Riga, Hansson, who is currently the governor of Estonia’s central bank, said: “I think we will come back a few years from now and say how could we ever have gotten into this situation where we believed this kind of a fairy-tale story.”
He went on to claim that regulators need to continue clamping down on cryptocurrencies, stating that there could be serious problems in terms of investor protection issues “if grandmothers start investing.”
Hansson isn’t the only member of the ECB who has a pejorative view on cryptocurrencies. Benoit Coeure, an executive board member at the ECB, said that Bitcoin was the “evil spawn” of the 2008 financial crisis.
At a conference held at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, he said: “Few remember that Satoshi embedded the genesis block with a Times headline from January 2009 about the UK banks bailout. In more ways than one, Bitcoin is the evil spawn of the financial crisis.”
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