Bitcoin is not recognized as a cash or as a medium of trade in Ukraine, an official of the country’s central bank has stated.
“We can say that this is definitely not a currency, because there is no central issuer. And we cannot recognize this as a means of payment,” said Oleg Churiy, deputy head of the National Bank of Ukraine, as per a report on Friday by the Ukrainian website Financial Club, as translated by Google.
Reverberating late remarks by senior financial services executives in the U.S., the Ukrainian central banker depicted bitcoin as an unsafe investment for consumers. In any case, he minimized any fundamental worries about bitcoin and its brethren.
“World regulators are not concerned with any threat of cryptocurrency because of their small volume,” Churiy said at the Ukranian Financial Forum. “They are concerned only with the fact that people can lose money [by investing in them]. And fraud that can be [committed] with them.”
The Ukrainian central bank has been cautioning about the risks and dangers of bitcoin for quite a long while, and a month ago it demonstrated it might soon regulate the use of cryptocurrencies.
However at the same time, Ukraine’s government has as of late been testing the distributed-ledger technology that bitcoin inspired, in a novel use case: auctioning seized assets.
Bitcoin has even figured in Ukrainian politics lately, with separatists and other political nonconformists utilizing the permissionless, borderless framework to raise and exchange funds.
