'Fair Value of Bitcoin Is Still Zero,' Say European Central Bank Officials

By Stacy Elliott

Two European Central Bank officials have been little moved by the approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs in the U.S.

The Securities and Exchange Commission approved 11 spot Bitcoin ETFs to begin trading in January. Since then, the funds have surpassed more than $3 billion in net flows, saw more than $1 billion in deposits in a week, and kicked off speculation that an Ethereum ETF could be next.

"For disciples, the formal approval confirms that Bitcoin investments are safe and the preceding rally is proof of an unstoppable triumph," wrote ECB officials Ulrich Bindseil and Jürgen Schaaf in a blog post Thursday. "We disagree with both claims and reiterate that the fair value of Bitcoin is still zero."

A message from the ECB linking to the blog post has attracted some very pointed and colorful responses from Crypto Twitter.

This isn't a new sentiment from Bindseil and Schaaf. In November 2022 they declared that Bitcoin was on the "road to irrelevance" and that it was plain to see as much even before crypto exchange FTX went bust.

Their main complaints about BTC are that its transactions are slow and costly, it is not a suitable investment, and that the act of mining bitcoin—the mechanism that secures the network—continues to "pollute the environment on the same scale as entire countries."

The authors also go on to say that Bitcoin has always been "characterised by price manipulation and other types of fraud."

To address the elephant in the room—or as they put it, the bouncing dead cat—the authors claimed the BTC's surging price and growing market capitalization is only a measure of "the overall social damage that will occur when the house of cards collapses."

At the time of writing, Bitcoin has a market capitalization of $1 trillion and BTC is trading for $51,645.91, according to CoinGecko data. That's an 0.4% gain since yesterday and 1.7% lower than it was this time last week.

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