Cryptocurrencies don’t meet the requirements of money, according to the South African Reserve Bank which has decided to call them by a different name. It’s one that does not imply either currency or cryptography. “We prefer to use the word ‘cyber-token’,” said a high-ranking official of the central bank in Pretoria, adding another entry into a long list of substitutes favored by financial authorities over the original term.
Also read: The Government Dilemma: How To Tax Something One Pretends Does Not Exist
Cyber Tokens – But Why?
It’s not unusual for officials around the world to refrain from uttering the word. For many of them, “cryptocurrency” probably sounds like a bad omen. Central bankers are the worst – “crypto” is usually a “no-no” in their financial vocabulary. But the spread of cryptocurrencies has forced policy makers and government experts to demonstrate some linguistic ingenuity. Many now speak more and more often about them with artificially invented synonyms. The list of generic terms is growing and we owe the latest entry to the South African Reserve Bank.
“We don’t use the term ‘cryptocurrency’ because it doesn’t meet the requirements of money in the economic sense of the stable means of exchange, a unit of measure and a stable unit of value,” the central bank’s Deputy Governor, Francois Groepe, told reporters in Pretoria this week. “We prefer to use the word ‘cyber-token’,” he added, quoted by Bloomberg.
The popularity of cryptocurrencies has been growing exponentially around the globe and South Africa is no exception. Regulators in the country, like many of their colleagues abroad, are finding it hard to keep up with the pace of crypto progress. SARB has recently set up a special unit tasked to review
