Cryptocurrency is not a medium of exchange, which is one of the key characteristics of money, Mastercard CEO Ajaypal Singh Banga has said at a conference in the Indian consulate in New York, Indian channel NDTV reported on Thursday. The big price fluctuations and the lack of transparency are the main deficiencies of virtual coins in the eyes of the chief executive of the world's second-largest payments processor.
“I think cryptocurrency is junk. The idea of an anonymized currency produced by people who have to mine it, the value of which can fluctuate wildly - that to me is not the way that any medium of exchange deserves to be considered as a medium of exchange,” Banga said.
Banga explained that 95% of all illegal transactions on the dark web, including child prostitution, drugs, credit card and social security fraud, are paid via cryptocurrency but did not reveal if this is a MasterCard data or not.
During the New India Lecture, organized by the Indian Consulate in partnership with the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF), Banga said that crypto anonymity is the reason why Russia had used Bitcoin (BTC) as part of its attempts to meddle in the 2016 US Presidential election. Earlier this month, the US authorities revealed that 12 Russian intelligence officers used BTC for the most of the delicate transactions related to the hacking of the Democratic Party National Committee (DNC).
“Why civil society would like to put a snake in its backyard and think that somehow the snake will only bite my neighbor, I don't get it,” Banga said.
Indian-born Banga became CEO of MasterCard in 2010. Since then, the US-based multinational payment provider has filed several crypto-related patents. Some of them are for blockchain, the technology that underpins virtual coins like Bitcoin, and do not aim to use cryptocurrencies. However, several days ago, the company won a patent, whose goal is to speed up digital currency payments.
This article appeared first on Cryptovest
