Speaking on behalf of the IMF, spokesman Gerry Rice weighed in on the benefits of cryptocurrencies in their use as payments as well as their abuse in money laundering, fraud and terrorist financing.
Speaking to reporters in Washington, Rice added in quotes reported by Bloomberg:
“When asset prices go up quickly, risks can accumulate, particularly if market participants are borrowing money to buy. It’s important for people to be aware of the risks and take the necessary risk-management measures.”
Speaking to reporters in Washington, Rice added in quotes reported by Bloomberg:
“When asset prices go up quickly, risks can accumulate, particularly if market participants are borrowing money to buy. It’s important for people to be aware of the risks and take the necessary risk-management measures.”
Hmmm, that last sentence sounds like a pretty accurate description of the stock market (i.e. prices going up fast, borrowing to buy, be aware of risks and manage them)
Rice did not delve into specifics of the kind of collaboration or policies that the IMF is pushing for.
And the "we're looking into it" rhetoric has been going on for how long, exactly?
The best they can do is exactly what the existing exchanges have already done: AML and KYC at the fiat gateway side. There's little hope of achieving anything else, once cryptocurrency takes off meaningfully (i.e. more than single percentage points of people are using it), there's not much that can be done. These top-down centralist thinkers should understand the way this ends, they only have to look at the history of decentralised technology to see that if the tech is powerful enough, it changes everything (and the old structures and their centers of power are swept away)
They tried stopping it, they're going to try regulating it, as nation states and as regional blocs. They're going to throw everything they can at Bitcoin but they will soon realise that what doesn't kill Bitcoin actually makes it healthier.
The EU is the least likely political entity to be able to come up with a unified policy. There are several serious challenges to the EU's overall coherency right now (in Germany, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Spain, Italy and probably more). It's incredibly fragile.
So no political force that actually cares about Bitcoin is in any position to even attempt a workable policy, let alone actually implement one (which is the whole point really: there's very little that can realistically be done. They can do something ineffectual on their own, or do something ineffectual together
) 
