Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Authoritarian Cryptocurrencies Are Coming

Russia and China see a new way to completely control their financial systems.

October 17, 2017 at 6:00 AM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Central banking, the bitcoin way.
Photographer: Alexander Nemenov/AFP/Getty Images

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With Russia and China both embracing the idea of sovereign cryptocurrencies, it's time to ask a simple question: Why is a technology threatening to decentralize money so attractive to highly centralized, authoritarian regimes?

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