This is the Kato Daily Podcast for Thursday, May 9th, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.

How does the Block Chain Regulate? What promised does it hold for conventional finance and how a

regulators attempting to control cryptocurencies? At the Cato Institute City

seminar last month in San Francisco I sat down with Cato's Matthew Feeney and Diego Zilawaga

to discuss the future of blockchain and cryptocurrency. What are the big

opportunities that blockchain technology offers?

Well, unless you follow the, you know, the cryptocurrency space and blockchain technology in a daily basis,

you probably have come across the term in the context of

Bitcoin which was the first cryptocurrency went live in January of 2009 and the

great promise of Bitcoin was to create a payment system in which there was

no central counterparty there was no central

counterpart. There was no one regulating transactions,

no one monitoring people, no one checking what was going on at

every point in time, and also no one able to block access to the network.

Blockchains are typically open access.

Anyone can come in and anyone can potentially

enter information into the ledger.

And that makes it a very useful tool to overcome some of the issues that we deal with

at Cato all the time in terms of government stifling things, blocking access or

placing mandates on people. Now Bitcoin is, as I mentioned focused on people. Now, Bitcoin is, as I mentioned, focused on payments primarily,

but there are plenty of applications

of blockchain technology across the board

...