Opinions

Bitcoin Expert Eviscerates US Treasury’s ‘Fascist’ Crypto Blacklist: In a discussion about the US Treasury Department Office of Foreign Asset Control’s addition of cryptocurrency addresses to the “no pay list,” Bitcoin speaker and celebrity Andreas Antonopoulos called the move “completely useless” and “fundamentally fascist.”

Bitcoin and Crypto Hedge Fund Founder Charts Dystopian Future Where Governments Control Digital Currencies: Ari Paul, chief financial officer, managing partner and co-founder of crypto hedge fund BlockTower Capital, just dropped his vision of financial dystopia in an epic tweetstorm. Surveillance on steroids is coming to a society near you, courtesy of governments around the world that will try to brand, issue and operate their own highly trackable and traceable digital currencies. Their most damaging feature will be a freeze-and-seize function that will allow a government to cut off your purchasing power and revoke your ownership rights at the flip of a bureaucratic switch.

CFTC Commissioner Brian Quintenz Suggests Creation of Crypto Self-Regulatory Organization: United States Commodity and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) commissioner Brian Quintenz has suggested that participants in the cryptocurrency industry should create a self-regulatory structure. More precisely, Quintenz said that because of the CFTC’s lack of crypto statutory oversight capability, he suggested that crypto “platforms come together to form some type of self-regulatory structure where they can discuss, agree to, implement, and hopefully examine or audit.”

Craig Wright Claims to Be Satoshi in Critical Response to CFTC on Ethereum: NChain chief scientist Craig Wright has criticized ethereum to a top U.S. regulator, while again claiming to be bitcoin’s pseudonymous inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto.

Cryptos Could Challenge ‘Any Financial Framework’: New FSB Chair: The new chair of the Financial Stability Board (FSB) believes the emergence of crypto-assets could be a major hurdle for the agency as it plans to review its current frameworks for assessing global financial vulnerability. In his inaugural speech, Randal K. Quarles, who also serves as the vice chair for supervision at the U.S. Federal Reserve Board of Governors, said the FSB will start reviewing its framework to ensure it’s “at the cutting edge of financial stability vulnerability assessment.”

Bitcoin Has a Florida Problem by Justin Wales, a senior counsel and co-chairs the Blockchain and Virtual Currency practice at Carlton Fields.

‘Crypto Mom’ Hester Peirce Checks Bitcoin Regulation Overreach on Mom and Pop Investors: Commissioner Hester Peirce, aka “Crypto Mom”, who issued a dissent last year to the SEC’s rejection of the Winklevoss Bitcoin ETF proposal, continues to urge her colleagues to foster crypto innovation without regulatory overreach. In a recent tweet, she reaffirms her position that the US Securities and Exchange Commission is not a “merit regulator” issuing seals of approval, a point Peirce tried to drive home in her official 2018 dissent. She continues to draw the line over too much coddling by regulators.

Bakkt: What Should We Expect From an Exchange Tailor-Made for Wall Street Investors? on Cointelegraph.

Russian Minister of Justice: Cryptocurrency Doesn’t Yet Need to Be Legally Defined: The Ministry of Justice of Russia does not see the need to legally define the concept of cryptocurrency at this point. Alexander Konovalov reportedly claimed that it is too early to formalize crypto-related legislation to date. Konovalov based his remarks on the fact that cryptocurrencies cannot be used as a payment method in the country, according to the Russian Constitution.