- The Financial Times has always had a thing about Bitcoin, but that ‘thing’ has burgeoned into a full blown obsession
- The newspaper mentioned Bitcoin 23 times in a four-day span last week
- The newspaper has been reduced to complaining about its environmental cost
For a newspaper that purports to hate Bitcoin, the Financial Times sure does talk about it – a lot. The digital version of the venerable newspaper mentioned Bitcoin in no fewer than 23 articles between Thursday and Sunday – that’s more than most crypto outlets! Describing Bitcoin as a “Keynesian beauty contest”, the Financial Times relied on the much-worn and much-disputed environmental concerns as the basis for almost all its hand-wringing, which denotes a shift in policy over recent years.
Financial Times Loses the Plot Over Tesla Purchase
The Financial Times has had an obsession with Bitcoin ever since it first reported on it in June 2011. Like many outlets, and individuals, entrenched in the world of traditional finance, its journalists have predicted the cryptocurrency’s death on a regular basis (apparently bubbles can inflate, pop, and re-inflate but still be bubbles), and yet Bitcoin marches on, forcing its naysayers to retreat to more outdated bulwarks for its arguments.
The Financial Times’ Bitcoin obsession has gone through the roof in recent days since Tesla announced a $1.5 billion buy in, revelling like pigs in muck over the environmentally conscious Musk investing so much in an asset that any Financial Times reader would think is on course to destroy the planet single-handedly.
As a side note, it’s interesting to see that the Financial Times has no issue with the environmental (and human) cost of digging out and refining gold, silver, platinum and the like year after year for some 5,000 years so that ladies can wear pretty rings, necklaces, and bracelets. Oh, sorry, yes, ‘electronics’.
Bitcoin’s “Fossil-fuel Fixation”
Tesla’s Bitcoin purchase seemed to stoke the fires beneath the collective feet of the famously anti-Bitcoin journalists and had them reaching for the vitriol. One reporter even claimed that Bitcoin has a “fossil-fuel fixation”, which would be news to almost every recently-established Bitcoin mining farm who almost exclusively search for renewable enery sources.
The Tesla news seems to have really angered the Financial Times into ratcheting up their Bitcoin obsession to new levels, to the point where you fear for their sanity. 2020 and 2021 have seen Bitcoin bought and adopted on a scale we have never seen before, which must have had them gnashing their teeth so hard you worry about their dental bills.
The bad news for them is that the trend is likely to continue, with even the FT themselves citing sources who (remotely, one assumes, for fear of being stabbed with a letter opener) talked up the prospect of…horrors…MORE Bitcoin adoption! Before long the collective anger of Financial Times journalists towards Bitcoin will be enough to power Sri Lanka…or Wales…or Cuba…or Guatemala…or something.
