Swiss National Bank won’t hold BTC as reserve currency: report

The Swiss central bank will not be holding BTC as a reserve currency, the chairman has revealed. Speaking recently, the central bank chief said BTC doesn’t meet the requirements of a reserve currency, even as the bank’s involvement with fossil fuel companies came into focus.

Swiss National Bank (SNB) Chairman Thomas Jordan confirmed that the bank has weighed the feasibility of holding BTC and decided against it, as reported by Reuters. 

“Buying [BTC] is not a problem for us, we can do that either directly or can buy investment products which are based on [BTC]. We can arrange the technical and operative conditions relatively quickly, when we are convinced we must have [BTC] in our balance sheet,” Jordan states, speaking at last week’s annual general meeting.

Jordan said BTC doesn’t meet the requirements of currency reserves, and “that’s why we have until now decided not to have bitcoin on our balance sheet.”

The SNB holds over $950 billion in foreign currency investments, a record high that it hit this year. It’s an aggressive investor in foreign equities, which take up about 25% of its reserves, and way more government bonds. This approach makes it one of the biggest investors in foreign companies, including Facebook and Apple.

During the meeting, protestors flooded Bern, where the annual meeting was taking place, demanding the bank to stop its investments in companies contributing to global warming through high carbon emissions.

“The Swiss National Bank invests billions in the fossil fuel industry every year. In doing so, it generates almost as many CO2 emissions as the whole of Switzerland does domestically,” one protestor named Nora Scheel from the group Campax told Reuters. 

This opposition would hit a fever pitch if the bank were to adopt BTC as a reserve currency. One of the biggest criticisms of the digital currency in recent times has been its consumption of energy which has been compared to that of a developed country, higher than Argentina. 

BTC is relatively inefficient, with its small block sizes limiting its throughput to a mere five to seven transactions per second. This translates to very high energy consumption for very little output, giving climate change activists all the ammunition they need to make a case against BTC and, by extension, even the other digital currencies, even one that’s as energy-efficient as BSV. 

Watch: CoinGeek New York presentation, A Study of Bitcoin & Blockchain Energy Consumption