An open letter to Ulrich Bindseil and Jürgen Schaff of The European Central Bank

November 30, 2022

Dear Mr. Bindseil and Mr. Schaaf of the European Central Bank,

It is with amusement as well as dismay that I write to you today, on the day of your publication of your ECB Blog report, “Bitcoin’s Last Stand.” I am amused because of just how ridiculous and silly you both appear, leaning on tired and long-debunked narratives about Bitcoin and its uselessness and waste. And I am
disturbed because, for two very well-degreed and established members of your field, I'd have expected a much more sophisticated set of critical viewpoints regarding the burgeoning Bitcoin and Lightning.

You've truly done yourselves a disservice with your amateurish attempts at sowing fear, uncertainty, and doubt about an open-source global cooperative project that functions as an ever-growing value storage and transfer system for many tens of millions of people worldwide. A system that more and more regular people make use of each year, as its effectiveness and case of use become known to them. And a system that has never been hacked or cracked, which works to “bank the unbanked,” especially in those countries and places where they have been grievously oppressed by sinister totalitarian governments, or simply abandoned by the financially “developed” world. Indeed, Bitcoin is already legal tender in the nations of El Salvador and The Central African Republic, and just yesterday it received special “means of payment” status in Brazil.

It’s not without a sense of irony that I write that you miss the mark so thoroughly, specifically because the banking and financial systems you are part of are responsible for energy and material waste that are orders of magnitude larger than those systems and resources which power and maintain the Bitcoin network. I’m sure you are well-aware of the revolutionary carbon- and greenhouse-gas-reducing effects that Bitcoin mining facilities have when they are co-located on methane emitting landfills and/or oil production facilities. And I know you're also well informed of solar- and wind-powered Bitcoin mining clusters helping to set up microgrids in underserved communities.

I could go on about how the Lightning network is being implemented to facilitate remittance payments as well as to bring financial technology and sovereignty to communities in Laun America and sub-Saharan Africa. But let me just get to the part that simply makes a common man like me profoundly sad. Bitcoin, as you well know (despite your silly and outdated smears) is a technological network that is not based on, or debased by, national or international debt or the whimsy of politicians. It is a system that is beyond the control of any one person, country or block of countries. Indeed, if Bitcoin could speak (which, in fact, it does, approximately every ten minutes, through the electro-mathematical crackle and hum of truth-fire) it might echo these words: “Above all nations is humanity.”

As bank-men of the European Union, as humans from Earth, as biological entities subject to the same laws of decay and disease as all other beings, wouldn’t it be refreshing for you both to welcome a study of and participation in a technology that functions to preserve the work and efforts of the toiling humans of our planet, rather than debase them? As fellow bitcoiner, Alyse Killeen, has repeatedly said, “Bitcoin is FinTech for poor people.”

I am grateful for your attention, and hopeful that you will think on and study Bitcoin more profoundly.

Sincerely,

Cosmo Crixter