A Crypto Truce Emerges Between Fraud and Revolution
Innovators and regulators may still not agree completely but there’s more common ground now than a few years ago.
Growing pains.
Photographer: Paul Yeung/Bloomberg via Getty Images
I sense a growing middle-of-the-road regulatory consensus on crypto currencies. It splits the difference between “crypto is a Ponzi scheme to defraud investors and enable criminals,” on the one hand, and “crypto solves ancient financial problems and will usher in an era of prosperity and freedom,” on the other. It envisions a future in which domesticated crypto plays nicely within the traditional financial regulatory system.
Last week, four senior International Monetary Fund executives published an outline for international regulation of crypto on IMF Blog that does a good job of summarizing this view. It proposes four principles for crypto regulation: one good, one bad and two ugly.