The general manager of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has savaged bitcoin as a "combination of a bubble, a Ponzi scheme and an environmental disaster."
In a lecture given in Frankfurt, Germany, Carstens said there were cracks appearing in the "house of bitcoin" as too many copycat currencies had forked off the technology, including bitcoin gold and bitcoin cash. The banker argued this replication could only lead to debasement of cryptocurrencies to the point where they held no economic value at all.
The BIS is known as the "central bank's bank" as that is where the likes of the Federal Reserve and Bank of England hold accounts. Carstens cited trust as another problem for cryptocurrencies as they would never be governed or supported by such institutional infrastructure.
Carstens then called into question bitcoin's efficiency and legality.
"While perhaps intended as an alternative payment system with no government involvement, it has become a combination of a bubble, a Ponzi scheme and an environmental disaster," he said. "The volatility of bitcoin renders it a poor means of payment and a crazy way to store value."
"Cryptocurrencies piggyback on the institutional infrastructure that serves the wider financial system, gaining a semblance of legitimacy from their links to it," said Mr. Carstens, general manager of the Bank for International Settlements, a Basel, Switzerland-based institution that acts as a lender and think tank for central banks
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/06/bitcoin-and-cryptocurrencies-are-ponzi-bubbles-says-bis.html
We got the head of the BIS calling it a ponzi scheme. I'll take his word over somebody's daughters.