In December, the Rothschild family reportedly purchased bitcoin exposure, via the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, for the first time. They were not alone as later in the year, as we detailed here, Venrock, the official venture capital arm of the Rockefeller family, has partnered with crypto investment group Coinfund to support cryptocurrency and Blockchain business innovation, Fortune reported April 6.

So the involvement of some of the oldest-money-families in the world in what Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger call "unproductive turds" has raised more than few questions about whether the Rothschilds and the like can control crytpocurrencies.

The conspiracy theories around Rothschilds’ cryptocurrency control are being heated up by a 1988 publication in The Economist, a magazine controlled by the family.

“Thirty years from now, Americans, Japanese, Europeans, and people in many other rich countries, and some relatively poor ones will probably be paying for their shopping with the same currency. Prices will be quoted not in dollars, yen or D-marks but in, let’s say, the phoenix. The phoenix will be favored by companies and shoppers because it will be more convenient than today’s national currencies, which by then will seem a quaint cause of much disruption to economic life in the last twentieth century... The biggest change in the new world economy since the early 1970’s is that flows of money have replaced trade in goods as the force that drives exchange rates... The alternative – to preserve policymaking autonomy- would involve a new proliferation of truly draconian controls on trade and capital flows. This course offers governments a splendid time. They could manage exchange-rate movements, deploy monetary and fiscal policy without inhibition, and tackle the resulting bursts of inflation with prices and incomes polices. It is a growth-crippling prospect. Pencil in the phoenix for around 2018, and welcome it when it comes."

And now, as RT reports, the founder of the world's second biggest cryptocurrency Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, has questioned whether the Rothschild conspiracy theory extends to digital money.

“Are 'the Rothschilds' even well-coordinated enough to be worth caring about as a group these days?” Buterin asked on Reddit.

Are "the Rothschilds" actually remotely as powerful and coordinated as the conspiracy theorists seem to believe, or are they just a group of old-money socialites and all that other stuff is overhyped?



Help me learn and decide! https://t.co/rYcyEHhM6F — Vitalik "Not giving away ETH" Buterin (@VitalikButerin) May 26, 2018

Buterin raised the issue as cryptocurrency enthusiasts are discussing the opaque IMMO blockchain project the banking dynasty is reportedly investing in.

Reports about IMMO first surfaced in the local cryptocurrency industry press last week. While all information is based on rumors and leaked information, the crypto-society has said it can be a digital token backed by natural resources like gold or somehow related to real estate.

The project is reported to be watched personally by Alexandre de Rothschild, the newly-appointed head of the family’s banking dynasty.

After fielding responses from Reddit users about the knock-on effect for sentiment regarding cryptocurrency should the rumors be true, Buterin, however, remained unconvinced of the Rothschild dynasty’s providence.

“[M]y updated view after seeing the replies is that they are just people born into various old-money-type high-society positions, and the theories that they are anything beyond that are fairly baseless,” he added in a later edition of his original post.

Will we ever really know?