If digital currency is ever going to go mainstream, regulators will need to remove the doubt that surrounds it. But before that happens they need to understand the technology. At a series of panels during the second day of the Consensus 2016 conference in New York City, a representative of the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, a former member of the White House communications team and multiple startup founders took turns predicting the future regulatory climate for digital currencies like bitcoin.
What connected each of the panels, which spanned a wide range of topics, was a distinct sense that the chasm between regulators and digital currency was only as big as the industry’s willingness to teach them. Educating the regulators
Former spokesperson for President Obama, Jamie Smith, argued on her panel that the first step to getting a more widespread regulatory blessing on digital currency is to teach international regulators about the technology.
Now global chief communications officer at mining company BitFury, Smith is working to expand the firm’s services to include a wide range of blockchain efforts. And, true to her word, she’s engaging with industry leaders and bureaucrats to standardize the way we talk about cryptocurrency.
Smith said: "Everybody wants to be part of something special and they want to talk about it. I think we shouldn’t underestimate that a lot of regulators are really young and fresh on the scene and others have been around for while, and they’d both like to have something interesting to engage with." By standardizing the way we talk about this new technology, she believes regulators will accelerate the rate they learn and, as a result, be less likely to react negatively to topics they don’t immediately understand.
While Smith mentioned the Blockchain Alliance as a specific example of a group able to get […]
