Missed out on the dodgy deals for PCR tests being advertised on the government’s own website? Still got some money to lose? Good old gov.uk has the opportunity of a lifetime!
In a blog entitled “Expectations of Bitcoin”, published on gov.uk, the Government Actuary’s Department opines on the money to be made from cryptocurrency trading, which one of the state’s actuaries has pursued (in their spare time, we assume) to a 70 per cent return in a single year. Like the qualified investment analysts that can be found on TikTok, the Government Actuary’s Department notes that its promotion of history’s largest Ponzi scheme is “in no way any kind of advice!” (Good to know that the views published by Her Majesty’s government don’t constitute advice.)
The main “expectation” of the Government Actuary’s Department is the complicated and highly technical thesis among Bitcoin experts that the number will go up.
“We can expect a parabolic move towards the cycle peak in the coming months,” said the government representative, which sounds totally legit and is accompanied by a multicoloured chart reminiscent of the “rainbow graphs” used by crypto-evangelists to make the case that even though the price is plunging now, it’ll make you rich as long as you keep holding that bag.
You’d want to make use of that chart if you’d gambled, as the government appears to recommend, the cost of a holiday to New Zealand on Bitcoin when the blog was published on Friday (3 December). Without subtracting transaction fees, you would have lost 14.8 per cent of your investment from noon on Friday to noon on Monday.
The Chatterer is going to go out on a limb and suggest that the Government Actuary’s Department – the part of government the job of which is to advise on financial risk – shouldn’t suggest people put their money into extremely volatile investments, or in assets they don’t understand, which aren’t covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, which are regularly hacked, and the price of which has been shown to be manipulated by fraud.
We get it: Bitcoin is code, and the future is made of code. But what’s also code is the big long code professional actuaries have to follow, which specifies that they shouldn’t have a direct financial interest in the advice they give. Cryptocurrency prices depend on the faith of the people who are persuaded to buy them, so using the government’s own website to suggest that they will continue rising is a pretty clear conflict of interest.
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