fork ” – i very much like this particular word ) between bitcoin and bitcoin cash or the recent split between litecoin and litecoin cash. a piece of code is, in effect, easier to duplicate and improve upon. the fact that cryptocurrencies are rather commodities also shapes our light - touch, liberal approach to regulation at the cnb. we do not want to ban them and we are not hindering their development, but we are also not actively helping or promoting them and we are not protecting them or the customers that use them. like in a casino, everyone investing in a cryptocurrency must be prepared to lose the entire bet. and central banks do not regulate casino visits. as you can see, i could easily spend all of my time today talking about the problems of cryptocurrencies, and of bitcoin in particular. i could talk about how much energy it consumes – at some points last year, the bitcoin ecosystem consumed twice as much energy as nigeria, an oil giant with 190 million people. by the way, the energy consumed on a single bitcoin transaction until 2017 could power a typical american household for more than three weeks. i could talk about how a seven - fold increase in the value of bitcoin some time ago was driven by the manipulation of a single trader. i could talk about the volatility of bitcoin, which surpasses that of any other commonly traded commodity and which renders bitcoin useless for the vast majority of people. i could talk about the funny thing that bitcoin as a quasi - currency was created to make payments cheap and fast, while in reality it is more often than not expensive and slow. 1 / 3 bis central bankers'speeches but instead, i will stress – and this is my point today – the positive philosophical influence of bitcoin on the conservative world of central banking. true, it is far from clear that anytime soon a full - fledged digital currency ( be it blockchain based or not ) will be created by a central bank ( some of you may be following the debate in the riksbank in sweden ), but the last three years have seen an explosion of research on this idea in many central banks. bitcoin must be credited for this powerful intellectual stimulus. when so many professors at the most esteemed universities of the developed world are not thinking about potential reforms of the current monetary order,

also typical for financial services, or the banking sector as such, due both to state regulation ( such as compulsory cashless transfers above certain thresholds ) and to the markets and technological progress ( such as credit cards, smooth money transfers, contactless payments etc. ) all this is happening on - line in small steps, incrementally, and all this means banks might in bad times be seen as utilities, much less resolvable due to the complex services they provide, than in the past. and the complexity of the services of a utility is sometimes visible only very shortly before its potential collapse. so “ utilities ” providing products with incrementally increasing dependence will be able to exit the market in a much more complicated way, if at all. the same applies to the financial sector, all the more so if we go down the road to a lesscash economy ( which is, of course, a slightly different concept than a cashless economy. and i do not believe we will ever achieve a cashless economy completely spontaneously ). and this is something we should take into account in the future, as it will further complicate balancing the vertices of the banking triangle, or the banking trilemma i mentioned earlier. thank you for your attention. bis central bankers ’ speeches