Diane Abbott, the United Kingdom’s sitting Shadow Home Secretary, said in an interview with The House magazine that Bitcoin “is just a gigantic Ponzi scheme,” and promised that the Labour party, of which she is a member, would regulate it if elected, Express news site reports Friday, March 2.
Speaking to The House, Abbott said that Bitcoin could “easily collapse,” stressing her opinion that the UK authorities should clamp down on its spread throughout the rest of the economy.
Abbott’s opinion echoes the statement made today by Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, about the need to hold Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to the “same standards,” as the rest of the financial system.
“We are looking at the Bitcoin issue. One of the problems with Bitcoin is the extent to which it is just a gigantic Ponzi scheme,” the Shadow Home Secretary continued her explanation of the risks posed by Bitcoin.
“And if everyone took their bitcoin money and tried to buy a new car all at once the whole thing would collapse.”
The Labour MP is known in the British public for making controversial and sometimes ill-informed remarks on a range of topics. Abbott once suggested that her party would be able to hire 10,000 people for the UK police at a total cost of £300,000, translating to an average annual salary of £30, or a little over $40, per each new officer.
Diane Abbott also tweeted that one of the lessons to be learned from the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire is that “fire puts out water,” and called for the UK government to do something about the drought in the province of Davao del Norte in Indonesia, which is actually located in the Philippines.
Abbot is not the only public figure to harshly criticize Bitcoin over the past month. Matthew Lesko, the “free money guy,” who became famous in the 90s by writing books on how to get federal grants from the US government, called Bitcoin a “scam” and a “gamble” in an interview with CNET.
Charlie Munger, a 94-year-old business partner of Warren Buffett and the vice president of the Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate, said that the idea of cryptocurrency is “totally asinine” and that it is “disgusting” that people buy Bitcoin.
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