The CTO of Bank of America (BoA) recently commented that the supposed lack of transparency of cryptocurrencies has hindered law enforcement agencies from catching “bad guys”.

Cathy Bessant, the chief technology officer of the multinational financial institution, believes that the transparency of the banking industry is conducive to a timely disclosure of illegal activities such as money laundering.

In the interview, Bessant said that the lack of transparency is one of the disturbing features of cryptocurrencies. She compares the traditional banking system with this financial innovation:

“As a payment system, I think it’s troubling, because the foundation of the banking system is on the transparency between the sender and the receiver, and cryptocurrency is designed to be nothing of the sort. In fact, it’s designed to be not transparent.”

This argument is somewhat weak, as cash is used to commit thousands of crimes every single day. The difference between cash and cryptocurrency is that cash does not have a publicly accessible blockchain which records every transaction and (practically) cannot be tampered with.

In a bit of a misconception, Cathy Bessant also claimed that cryptocurrency prevented law enforcement agencies from catching bad people:

“The way we sort of "catch" bad guys is by being transparent in the financial moment of money. Crypto is the antithesis of that.”

Bank of America prohibits customers from using the bank’s credit cards to purchase cryptocurrencies. Although some people may think that this is an attack on cryptocurrencies, for an institution that provides loans, the policy seems to be understandable because investing in cryptocurrencies poses significant risks. Cathy Bessant explained:

“Just like we don’t allow stocks to be purchased on our credit cards, we’re not going to allow cryptos or other currencies to be purchased on our credit cards.”

Bessant continued to explain that she believes that the distributed ledger technology (blockchain) which powers cryptocurrencies has “extremely high” potential. She does not believe in the crypto markets based around blockchain tech projects as they exist today, but says it could make banks better, faster and cheaper in the future.

Article by @cryptomarks