MIT Bitcoin Expo: Legislators Discuss Regulation, Potential of Blockchain Technology
Hyperbitcoinization enthusiast and writer
On March 9–10, 2019, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology hosted a two-day event, the MIT Bitcoin Expo 2019. Put together by the student-organized MIT Bitcoin Club, the conference welcomed more than just Bitcoin voices from every corner of the industry. One of those voices was that of U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Commissioner Hester Peirce.
Peirce sat down with Gary Gensler, ex-chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and senior advisor to the director of the MIT Media Lab, to discuss the progress of the SEC’s efforts to regulate the cryptocurrency industry. Notably, Gensler and Peirce launched into a discussion on what regulators can do better to protect investors from fraud and malicious actors.
Before the debate began, both Gensler and Peirce expressed their appreciation for the emerging technology. “It’s a new way to have tamper resistant data amongst the consensus of multiple parties,” Gensler said. “My research is mostly around the business of blockchain technology and … trying to find where are the real use cases where traditional data structures don’t work as well.”
Peirce expressed her own support for the space in relation to the SEC’s ongoing efforts to properly regulate it. “We have rules on the books that we have to enforce, but on the other hand, we don’t want to stop people from doing things that are going to make society a better place to live, that are going to make people’s lives easier, and enable people to interact in ways that they have not been able to in the past.”
Later in the presentation, the two veteran regulators went on to discuss what the government can do to protect investors by possibly regulatinged cryptocurrency exchanges.
Gensler believes that “exchanges are the gateway to get good public policy, particularly around AML laws, but also around investor protection.” He continued, “In essence, that there’s not a manipulated market with frontrunning and manipulation with the order books and the like.”
The discourse was...
Winklevoss Loss at the SEC
The US Securities and Exchange Commission issued its disapproval of proposed rule changes that would have allowed the listing and trading of the Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust on the Bats BZX Exchange. The “Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust,” as its name might suggest, is the creation of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, notorious figures in the prehistory of Facebook, and ubiquitous figures in the world of Bitcoin.
Technically the SEC decision on Thursday reaffirmed an earlier Disapproval Order, in March of this year. Bats BZX had petitioned for review of that disapproval order, and the SEC gave it a full-dress second look, a de novo review, giving “careful consideration to the entire record, including … all comments and statements submitted by BZX and other parties,” only to decide that the agency had gotten things right the first time.
The decision was not a unanimous one. Commissioner Hester Peirce dissented. The significance of the defeat of this proposal in the bigger picture of cryptocurrency history may be the extent to which her dissent throws light upon her thinking on the broad subject: she is the newest Commissioner, having just been confirmed in December 2017.