The Bank for International Settlements assured that the bitcoin is too unstable.

The Bank of International Payments (BIS for its acronym in English) just gave a hard blow to cryptocurrencies, ensuring that this technology is not ready to debut in conventional financial services .

The BIS presented an investigation in which it details that the bitcoin and the other currencies of that type suffered from "a series of shortcomings" that would prevent that the cryptocurrencies will realize the ambitious expectations that generated an explosion of interests.

The BIS, an 88-year-old institution based in Basel, Switzerland, which acts as a central bank for other central banks, said that cryptocurrencies are too unstable, consume too much electricity and are subject to excessive manipulation so that once serve as reliable means of exchange in the global economy .

The study mentioned the decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies (bitcoin and its imitators are created, negotiated and accounted for in a distributed network of computers) as a fundamental flaw and not as a key strength.

As the size of so many accounting records increased, the researchers concluded that virtual currencies would eventually overwhelm everything from smartphones to servers . "The volume of communications could lead to the interruption of the internet," according to the report.

The researchers said that competition among so-called bitcoin miners consumed approximately the same amount of electricity as Switzerland. "To put it succinctly, the search for decentralization has very quickly turned into an environmental disaster."

The BIS intervenes in a key moment of the development of cryptocurrencies. Although Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the New York Stock Exchange and other institutions take steps to offer customers access to the new market, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of the United States combats Offers of new digital currencies, which has determined abound in scams.

With information from Bloomberg

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