crime

Japan says any bitcoin regulation should be international

5 Comments
By Sophie Knight

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No, don't regulate it, or even try...

If people want government protection, then they should just hold central bank issued cash in a government regulated bank with a bank guarantee (for what it's worth).

The whole idea of bitcoin is that if you want to opt out of the government controlled system, you can. It's an option to prevent governments and central banks from transferring wealth from citizen's bank accounts to the government through excessive levels of currency printing or outright confiscation.

What this episode shows is not that government needs to regulate bitcoin, but that the bitcoin community needs to develop better infrastructure to properly protect holders of bitcoins.

Both systems always have their risks. Governments go off the rails. See Cyprus, and even in Japan bank accounts were essentially confiscated when the government made a switch to the "new yen" after WWII. Bitcoin obviously ain't perfect, but it sure isn't government's role to regulate something that is not supposed to have anything to do with government in the first place.

2 ( +2 / -0 )

The feds will be at the head of the queue to put him away, as per usual, it gives them a hard-on. Don't know if he's ever even been to the US but he could well see jail there, and to be honest it looks from the outside like he deserves it.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

davestrousers,

I don't know if he deserves it, but I do wonder if he was suitably equipped to be the CEO of an organization that deals with such amounts of money.

If he has taken off with cash (but I suspect he hasn't) then prosecute him for that, but if MtGox was just cracked and the bitcoins were "stolen", what can be done?

This is a crypto-currency problem, not a government-backed money problem.

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Smart money saw the writing on the wall and got out of Gox in time.

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Bitcoin was (and still is) an experiment in digital currency. It's value is worthless unless you assign a value from a more traditional currency to each bitcoin. Unlike traditional currencies, bitcoin does not have any physical assets to back up the value of the monetary unit. The value is set purely via trader speculation. Being an experiment, anyone who lost bitcoins when MtGox went offline is largely without recourse.

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