Sweden Appoints Bitcoin Skeptic Erik Thedéen as New Central Bank Governor

On Friday, Riksbank, Sweden’s central bank, announced the appointment of bitcoin skeptic and current head of the national financial regulator Erik Thedéen as its new governor.

Thedéen, who is the director-general of Sweden’s Financial Supervisory Authority (FSA), takes over for Stefan Ingves, who has led the bank since 2006.

The former Ministry of Finance official and CEO of the Stockholm Stock Exchange will start on January 1 and attend the February 2023 monetary policy meeting. Thedéen will be in office for six years.

The central bank’s General Council said in a statement:

“His (Thedéen) experience in managing financial authorities and organizations makes him well suited to become the new Governor of the Riksbank,”

The appointment of Thedéen has been regarded with scepticism in the crypto industry.

Eric Wall, a crypto analyst and trader based in Stockholm, tweeted that the new governor’s appointment could not have come at a “worse” time the markets, which are reeling from a spate of bad news. Wall has previously called Thedéen “ignorant.”

As vice-chair of the European Securities and Markets Authority (EMSA), Thedéen advocated for a bloc-wide ban on “proof of work” cryptocurrency mining, claiming that the industry’s energy consumption has become a “national issue” in his own country.

Thedéen told the Financial Times earlier this year:

“Bitcoin is now a national issue for Sweden because of the amount of renewable energy devoted to mining. It would be an irony if the wind power generated on Sweden’s long coastline would be devoted to Bitcoin mining.”

According to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, Bitcoin accounts for 0.53% of the world’s electricity.

Bitcoin is developed via a system known as “Proof-of-Work” (PoW), a decentralized consensus mechanism that compensates a network of supercomputers, or miners, for validating blockchain transactions.

However, some experts and economists have criticized the method, claiming that it wastes energy and contributes to climate change. Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency that also employs PoW, is currently switching to a more energy-efficient Proof-of-Stake protocol (PoS)

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Patrick

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