UBS group chief skeptical of Bitcoin’s longevity

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Speaking at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum on Wednesday, November 17, Axel Weber, president of UBS Group AG, expressed his skepticism about bitcoin and said the concept of anonymous payments would not last.

Weber’s comments are consistent with his past views on the cryptocurrency.

“I love technology, I think the idea of ​​having instant transactions between a lot of people is fantastic,” Weber said, according to Bloomberg. However, he believes the idea of ​​moving bank and cash payments to an “anonymous vehicle where both sides of transactions are not known” would not last.

Weber compared it to the days when governments phased out large denomination banknotes in an effort to avoid large, unidentifiable transactions. He said authorities wanted to prevent illegal activity and ultimately governments “will not tolerate” the cryptocurrency boom.

Meanwhile, Deutsche Bank analyst Marion Laboure believes bitcoin has some hurdles to overcome before the coin can be seen as a highly viable option for global payments, CoinDesk reported on Wednesday (November 17th).

Laboure says some of these obstacles are “extreme volatility, high transaction costs, and its large carbon footprint.”

She added that while the bitcoin network can process up to seven transactions per second, which equates to 600,000 transactions per day, Visa can process up to 24,000 transactions per second, or more than two billion transactions per day.

Laboure came up with a solution in the form of the Lightning Network, which aims to increase the scalability of bitcoin through more speed and at less cost.

The Lightning Network said it can process 25 million transactions per second and costs 4 cents per transaction. That would make it a thousand times faster than Visa, and cheaper at that. However, the report states that Visa and Mastercard have higher transaction volumes than Lightning Network.

Meanwhile, car auction house RM Sotheby’s announced on Wednesday (November 17) that it will begin accepting cryptocurrency payments for goods and services. The new service will be offered by BitPay, the world’s largest provider of such services.

By being able to accept crypto, RM Sotheby’s will be able to tap into the booming crypto scene, attracting new customers and sales.

RM Sotheby’s chief strategy officer Bryon Madsen said crypto had become “an important part of the financial landscape,” so the company wanted to offer it as an option.

Finally, shares of Marathon Digital Holdings fell nearly 28% on Monday (November 15) after the company said it obtained a subpoena from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The summons involved a data center in Hardin, MT, operated by the company.

CEO Fred Thiel spoke on Bloomberg TV and said they were “limited in what they could say,” but the company had shared the news of the subpoena for the sake of transparency.

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