At a webinar with Kaupr, BPI Norway presented its input: that the oil fund report more openly on its indirect bitcoin holdings, and that Folketrygdfondet, Norway's domestic pension fund, consider investing directly in bitcoin. BPI meets the Finance Ministry next week.
Photo: Top: Morten Myrstad (left) and Morten Søberg (right). Bottom: Preben Alexander Lugg (left) and Silvija Seres (right).
Bitcoinpolitisk Institutt Norge (BPI Norway) is a Norwegian membership organization working to increase knowledge of and political understanding for bitcoin. At a webinar held with Kaupr on Saturday 31 October, the discussion featured secretary-general Morten Søberg and board members Silvija Seres and Preben Alexander Lugg. The conversation moved from the institute's political work, through bitcoin as civil preparedness, to bitcoin's role in international trade and aid. During the broadcast, BPI also drew the winner of its membership-drive competition live, covered at the bottom of this article. The webinar also marked the fact that 31 October was the 18th anniversary of Satoshi Nakamoto publishing the bitcoin whitepaper.
BPI has grown from 150 members at its annual meeting in June to 265 at the time of the webinar, a 130 percent increase, with 52 new members in the past month alone. Søberg says the organization has now put forward two concrete proposals to parties in the Storting, Norway's parliament: that the oil fund should report more openly on its indirect bitcoin holdings, and that Folketrygdfondet, the fund that manages the Government Pension Fund Norway, should set aside capital to invest in bitcoin and other digital assets, as some state funds in Luxembourg and the central bank of Czechia have done.
– Already on Monday I'm meeting both the director general and others in the asset management department at the Ministry of Finance, Morten Søberg, secretary-general of BPI, also said.
He added that the whole Storting is now aware of what BPI thinks and proposes, but that it is nonetheless the Finance Ministry that decides much of the path forward. The institute also has an ongoing project with the American organization Human Rights Foundation on bitcoin's role in international aid.
Silvija Seres, who has served on the boards of several large companies, argued that Norwegian authorities and banks have been too cautious about exploring bitcoin and blockchain technology, and that Norway therefore risks missing the chance to help shape regulation of the field itself.
– We talk so much about preparedness, but we talk about it very abstractly. Many people think it's about having a few jugs of water and some oatmeal, maybe some batteries and a flashlight in the back pocket. But I see blockchain-based solutions or cryptocurrency as an alternative payment system you can fall back on if the banks and our institutions go down, Seres says.
She also pointed out that the Norwegian krone fluctuates a great deal in value, and that the country depends on American payment solutions such as Visa and Mastercard, in addition to Apple Pay and Alipay, which in practice manage monetary policy at a level above currency and interest rates. Seres also highlighted bitcoin mining as a tool for balancing power grids with a lot of variable output from wind and solar, citing Canada as an example, and noted that something similar likely played a part in the power outage in Spain earlier this year.
Søberg pointed out during the webinar that the US dollar is increasingly used as a political tool, through sanctions against banks, countries and individuals, and that this is leading more countries to look for alternatives in international trade. He stressed that bitcoin, unlike the dollar, has no major power with military force behind it, and that this makes the currency a geopolitically neutral alternative that Norwegian and Nordic actors ought to be able to explore and test.
The partnership with the Human Rights Foundation will look in particular at bitcoin's role in remittances from migrants, citing El Salvador as an example: roughly 25 percent of the country's GDP comes from such transfers, which internationally carry an average cost of around 6 percent. One of the UN's sustainable development goals is to cut this cost to 3 percent, and BPI believes bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can help make transfers cheaper and more efficient.
Søberg also said there is room for Norwegian and Nordic actors to get involved and test bitcoin in international trade, adding that it would be professionally interesting if BPI could help facilitate such testing.
BPI also drew the winner of its membership-drive competition live during the broadcast. The draw was scheduled for 31 October, the day Satoshi Nakamoto published bitcoin's whitepaper 18 years ago.
Preben Alexander Lugg, a BPI board member, carried out the draw itself, using a technical solution developed by Andreas Schjønhaug. The list of participants was locked and hashed at 3pm, and the winner was determined from the hash value of the first bitcoin block mined after that point — a method that makes the outcome impossible to predict or manipulate in advance.
The winner is named Mette, who had herself recruited five new members to BPI. The prize is a trip to El Salvador's capital, San Salvador, in late January, where she will attend the bitcoin conference Plan B.
Sources: Kaupr, BPI Norway
Watch the full recording of the webinar (in Norwegian) here:
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