France’s ‘Mister Bitcoin’ Says Crypto Providers Should Be Regulated

At present, there exist over 1,500 individual cryptocurrencies, and the number continues to increase by the week. This is because the knowledge of creating one’s own cryptocurrency has become so widespread that anyone with sufficient know-how can do it.

This overabundance of cryptocurrency, of course, means that the vast majority of them will end up worthless – or at least, not as relevant as the leading cryptocurrencies.

That leaves us with the question: what’s to become of these major cryptocurrencies, and of the medium as a whole? Jean-Pierre Landau, Deputy Governor of the Banque de France from 2006 to 2011, stated in a report to the French Ministry of Finance and Economy that the future of cryptocurrency would likely boil down into one of two outcomes: either it would degenerate and become marginalized, or worse, become extinct entirely; or experience what he calls a ‘Darwinian natural selection’ that would decide which of the major players in cryptocurrency attains dominance.

Cryptocurrency Critic to Cryptocurrency Mission Leader

In 2014, Landau made a critical comment about cryptocurrency, telling the Financial Times that it was the 21st century equivalent of the tulip (which was once used as a currency due to its phenomenally high price) and advised the people of Europe and the world at large to be wary of it. In January 2018, however, the Ministry of Finance and Economy had appointed Landau to look into the matter further and asked him to come up with his own regulations on the medium.

Since this appointment, Landau had changed his tone about the issue saying that direct regulation would hamper the proactive development of an ‘evolving technology’ and that public policies should be built around avoiding that. Now known as ‘Mister Bitcoin‘, Landau goes on to say that policies should produce a conducive environment for the growth of cryptocurrency.

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Landau’s Findings and Propositions

In Landau’s report to the Ministry of Finance and Economy, he said that the rarity of cryptocurrency transactions, the most common being Bitcoin accounted for only 0.2% of all transactions in Europe. This was caused by the decentralization of the medium which requires an inefficient and expensive verification method to be carried out. This creates a potentially permanent disadvantage for the cryptocurrency as according Landau states that it is impossible to marry decentralization and efficiency within the context of a monetary medium.

Landau advises that regulations should not be set in stone at this point in time as the cryptocurrency process is still evolving and yet to be fully identified. Regulation, in his view, should be fully reserved for the parties making use of the product and not the product itself.