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Norway’s minister of climate Sveinung Rotevatn is a Bitcoin ‘hodler’ đ¨ This article is 4 years old...
Norway’s minister of climate Sveinung Rotevatn is a Bitcoin ‘hodler’
The country is not exactly crypto friendly,â but high-ranked officials are not shying away from investing in the space.
2 min read
Updated: May. 7, 2021 at 9:40 am UTC
Photo by Mikita Karasiou on Unsplash
Norwayâs minister of climate and environment Sveinung Rotevatn sits on a stack of Bitcoin, he revealed in an interview this week.
â[Itâs] a well-suited store of value,â he said, adding that miningâusing powerful computing equipment to validate transactions on and maintain the networkâdid pose considerable environmental challenges.
Going Bitcoin
Norway is popularly known for its high-tech finance industry and is one of the few âcashlessâ countries on the planet. Only 4% of all payments are conducted with banknotes and coins.
But the adoption of digital payments hasnât quite spilled over to the crypto space: Its central bank has previously stated Bitcoin âdoesnât preserve stabilityâ and is âfar too costly.â
âThe basic property and task for a central bank and central-bank currency is to provide stability in the value of money and in the system, and that is not done by Bitcoin,â said Oystein Olsen, the governor of Norges Bank, in a statement earlier this year.
Rotevatn, however, has a different way of seeing it. âWhat might make Bitcoin so exciting is that it has some of the same properties. You canât suddenly discover a ton of Bitcoin somewhere, giving one country huge reserves,â he said, adding:
âItâs spread evenly, it grows slowly, but steadily, and has a finite supply. Therefore, itâs theoretically well-suited as a store of value.â
Norway's ?? Minister of Climate and the Environment, @Rotevatn, says he hodls #bitcoin
The minister carrying out the environmental policies of one of the most renewable energy-focused governments in the world, sees #bitcoin as "well-suited for a store of value"
— Documenting Bitcoin ? (@DocumentingBTC) May 6, 2021
Environmental concerns remain
The use of Bitcoin as a store-of-value aside, Rotevatn pointed out that environmental challenges remained a concern.
The minister said that a majority of the energy sources used by mining farms was ârenewableâ in nature, while claims of the asset using as much âenergy as the state of Texasâ were overblown.
He noted the banking and gold industries have, historically, consumed more energy than Bitcoin to little criticism. Someone inform the activists of that.
Bitcoin trades at $56,000 at press time. Explore analytics here.
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Bitcoin, a decentralized currency that defies the sway of central banks or administrators, transacts electronically, circumventing intermediaries via a peer-to-peer network.