The UK government has announced a consultation on crypto regulation. Dr. Wright believes that rather than new regulations, the priority should be to enforce existing financial laws because crypto is not outside the conventional financial system: “I mean, we should just actually start applying the rules and the argument that it's new, that it's online... It's really not.”
As far as Bitcoin SV is concerned, new regulation should be welcomed, and probably won’t require changes: “it'll just make our life easier as everyone else has to now start doing things that we've been doing already.”
On the first of a new series of CoinGeek Conversations, Dr. Wright defends his sometimes aggressive style on social media. He admitted that “some of it” might be seen as the digital equivalent of yelling, but insisted that was “usually only when there's trolls and you want to shut them down”.
On a recent YouTube interview he’d had some harsh words about Binance. On CoinGeek Conversations he backs up his view by describing an experiment he’d conducted to demonstrate how someone could make use of it in a way that could allow money laundering:
“I set up in one day 10,000 email addresses and registered 10,000 accounts on Binance from the US, both in the US and the foreign Binance where I had a two BTC limit. And in theory, their argument is that they have AML provisions, but that's $40,000 an account. So that's $400 million a day that I could transfer. And I could have added more accounts.”
Another way of showing that the ‘crypto’ sector isn’t operating as it should – if further proof is needed for anyone reading the news recently – is that there are more Bitcoins in total that are claimed to be on exchanges than the 21 million that will ever exist.“I mean in some of these like FTX and Binance together, there were over 40 million Bitcoin being sold …And even when you account for the same thing being sold in multiple exchanges, like some people argued, it's still too much Bitcoin.”
As for selling blockchain solutions to industry, Dr. Wright believes there’s a big marketing job to be done by nChain and others: “if there's no one telling them, then how do they know?” He compared this phase of developing the blockchain sector to his experience of the early days of the internet, when there were “big, massive conferences, multiday events” to which he was invited. “I went to parties by Cisco [and] from Sun. I got flown around the world when I was young because of Digital Equipment Corporation.”
In that spirit (without the free air travel), the London Blockchain Conference is coming up from May 31 to June 2.
In a second CoinGeek Conversation show next week, Dr. Wright discusses the origins of Bitcoin and explains how he set it going from his farm in Australia.