Japan backs global dialogue on Bitcoin, including at G-20

MLex Market Insight

News

4.9 • 9 Ratings

🗓️ 8 March 2018

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As Bitcoin has grabbed headlines with its wild price swings, authorities around the world have been scrambling to regulate the new phenomenon of digital currencies. Tsering Namgyal, MLex’s Hong Kong-based financial correspondent, was in Brussels with chief correspondent John Rega and news editor Sam Wilkin. Here they discuss different global approaches and what’s at stake.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to another M-Mlex podcast. I'm Sam Wilkin, Brussels news editor, and today we're going to talk about Bitcoin and other digital currencies.
0:20.2	Bitcoin has had a wild ride on the financial markets, shooting to $20,000 before losing
0:25.2	half that value. So, the Bitcoin bubble has deflated but it hasn't burst, and regulators
0:30.7	are realising that digital currencies are here to stay. That presents a challenge. How do you
0:35.9	regulate something as intangible as a digital currency?
0:39.3	Here to discuss that question are two Emlex reporters.
0:42.3	John Riga, our chief financial correspondent, and Sereng Namgall, our Hong Kong-based financial reporter,
0:48.3	who's been looking closely at cryptocurrencies and who is with us today in Brussels.
0:52.3	Hello, John and Seraring. Hello. Hello,
0:55.0	Okay, Sering, firstly, give us a very quick overview of what a digital currency is and why are
1:02.0	regulators concerned about them? The digital currency, as epitomised by Bitcoin, is hailed as one of the greatest innovations in recent years.
1:14.3	Basically, it's underpinned by this new technology called Distributed Ledger, otherwise known as blockchain.
1:22.1	And it has also spound an entire sort of family or industry of other currencies called
1:29.3	initial coin offerings, which has attracted a lot of scrutiny from the regulators.
1:35.3	So one of the biggest concern among the regulators is, of course, the consumer protection
1:41.3	because these are highly speculative, risky and characterized by, you know,
1:48.3	wild price swings. So you could lose a lot of money. And then secondly, of course,
1:55.0	these are highly sort of anonymous and very difficult to trace who is actually behind these transactions. So the
2:04.7	regulators are very concerned about the anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing
2:10.3	risks. And John, from what Serring was saying there, it sounds like a lot of this can be done
2:15.9	with existing regulations, for example, anti-money laundering. To what extent can regulators draw an existing toolboxes
2:22.7	that they have, and to what extent do they have to innovate here and come up with something
	...

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