Bundesbank Executive Board member Carl-Ludwig Thiele considers Bitcoin a risky and highly speculative form of investment. "It’s also possible for Bitcoin holdings to be completely wiped out," he writes in an op-ed for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. In addition, he draws attention to Bitcoin’s high level of energy consumption, citing Bundesbank estimates that settling a Bitcoin transaction uses roughly 460,000 times as much electricity as a normal transfer.

The need to introduce a macroprudential oversight framework is one of the key lessons we have learned from the recent financial crisis. But unlike many other areas of economic policy such as microprudential supervision, in this case there is no existing regulatory regime that can be expanded and no existing structure that can be reformed and refined. Instead, a completely new set of institutions, concepts and instruments is being created.