Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2014, called Bitcoin a “terrible” store of value that was also being used for illicit purposes. In 2017 he called it a fraud and more recently he declared it “worthless.” Few years ago, Bank of America’s chief executive, Brian Moynihan, debarred the company’s wealth managers from putting any customer money into cryptocurrency-related business. When regulators in New York were investigating methods of checkmating Bitcoin transactions, executives at Wall Street’s biggest banks bothered that regulating cryptocurrencies would also legitimize them and that could be a threat to the finance industry. So they tried to sow doubt.
Today, digital currencies are now the new rave. People and businesses including big banks around the world are embracing digital currencies at a rapid pace. Even governments are getting involved. A system that allows individuals bypass banks in money transfers, credit cards, loans, sales and business collections by connecting people instantly without an intermediary cannot be overlooked. There are now more than 75 million users of Bitcoin, up from around three million seven years ago, and the number of digital currencies has exploded threatening to take away that central role banks play. According to a report by Crypto.com, 220 million people transact business in the $2 trillion crypto-market globally.
Now the banking industry knows its problem. Regulators have not acted quickly enough and their inaction is costing banks valuable time in their mission to compete with other institutions that earlier embraced the crypto-space. It’s now hard for US banks to compete in this new world and profit from it.
Too late, just yesterday the US Justice Department set up the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, which will serve as the focal point for efforts to identify and dismantle the misuse of cryptocurrencies and other digital assets. US government is now speeding up to determine how to police the cypto-space claiming that it has become a new frontier for criminals and rogue nations to steal and launder billions of dollars. The US government claim that if they could recover almost all the Bitcoin ransom paid to the perpetrators of a cyber attack on Colonial Pipeline Co. and equally trace and seize Bitcoin valued at about $3.6 billion that was stolen during a 2016 hack, then they have the ability and capacity to regulate the crypto-market.
Do you think the US government acted late or early?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/01/business/banks-crypto-bitcoin.htmlhttps://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/2/17/us-justice-department-taps-new-cryptocurrency-czar