After Elon Musk, the Chinese central bank is now also opposing Bitcoin.
This causes a historic fall in the price of the cryptocurrency.
Beijing - The botcoin and the great chaos of China: On Wednesday night, the price of the cryptocurrency first slid below the $ 40,000 mark and temporarily fell by up to 27 percent to below $ 31,000. Within a few weeks, Bitcoin has shrunk to a good half of its annual high of $ 64,895, which was only achieved in mid-April. Other crypto currencies such as ether also collapsed in double digits, and the market lost a quarter of its value within a week. The reason is a momentous announcement from the Middle Kingdom at the wrong time.
The Chinese central bank declared cryptocurrencies to be “bogus currencies” on Tuesday, warned investors against “speculation” and called on financial institutions to neither accept nor use cryptocurrencies as a means of payment.
The central bank justified its appeal, among other things, with the recently strongly fluctuating exchange rate of virtual currencies abroad and the surge in speculation about digital money.
Bitcoin nosedive after announcement from China: "Security of goods supply endangered"
Cryptocurrencies would upset the global economic fabric and jeopardize the security of the supply of goods, the Chinese central bank warned in a statement. China had already declared payments with digital currencies to be illegal in 2019 out of concerns about the financial system and social stability. According to the
AFP
news
agency
, China is working on its own cryptocurrency.
Just recently, the Tesla case showed how susceptible Bitcoin is to public statements: Initially, the electric car maker invested heavily in Bitcoin.
At the same time, Tesla boss Elon Musk announced that he would accept the crypto currency as a means of payment and thus caused a Bitcoin boom.
However, after Tesla announced that Bitcoin would no longer be accepted and Musk indicated a sale of its Bitcoin holdings on Twitter, the crypto currency went downhill.
Chinese Bitcoin criticism comes at an inopportune time: "Musk got the ball rolling"
Musk cited environmental concerns as the reason for the Bitcoin withdrawal. "We are concerned about the rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and related transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel," the Tesla CEO wrote. In fact, so-called mining - i.e. the generation of bitcoins using extremely complex computing tasks in huge data centers - currently consumes around 151.16 terawatt hours (TWh) per year - as much as entire countries, according to Cambridge University.
“Musk got the ball rolling. It will take a while for investors to recover from this shock, ”predicts market analyst Timo Emden in the
Handelsblatt
. Since the recent price slide in response to the announcement from China, Bitcoin has returned to the level before Tesla entered the market. It's not the volatile cryptocurrency's first setback this year, but it's the most severe. Although Bitcoin has always been able to recover from the setbacks and then posted records, analysts today are reluctant to venture into predictions: "Even after the losses of the last few days, in my opinion, that remains little more than a gut feeling," said Sören Hettler, an analyst at DZ-Bank, the
Handelsblatt
.