A prominent technical specialist and former CIA agent has once again showed his support for Bitcoin by highlighting an important problem that the first cryptocurrency can easily fix –inflation.
Initially, Snowden reacted to a news piece about Lebanon devaluing its currency by 90% on Feb. 1. Snowden said that Bitcoin fixes that since, by its nature, the digital gold has a limited supply, which should limit its inflation and never cause a similar situation as happened with the Lebanese currency.
However, some users and subscribers rushed to disagree with the security specialist, considering Bitcoin’s performance in the last few years. Since 2021, the cryptocurrency has lost around 80% of its value, which does not really make it a perfect national currency.
As we all know, El Salvador previously tried to implement Bitcoin as the secondary currency in the country and digitize its economy in general. Unfortunately, the experiment did not go as planned since the country’s holdings lost almost half of their value.
Digital assets with a limited or decreasing supply might in fact become an issue in a traditional monetary system as, despite being less inflationary in terms of supply, the lack of intrinsic value might become a problem in the long term.
Additionally, Bitcoin’s value is highly volatile, fluctuating rapidly and unpredictably. This makes it difficult for businesses to accept and for individuals to use as a means of payment. Also, as El Salvador’s experience has shown, the current infrastructure of Bitcoin cannot handle the high volume of transactions required for it to function as a national currency.
In summary, Bitcoin’s current lack of stability, limited acceptance, scalability issues, difficulty with regulation and security concerns make it close to being unsuitable as a national currency.
