Britain’s Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer are planning to create new laws and regulations to control cryptocurrency trading.
From the swiss town of Davos, where the World Economic Forum is taking place, Theresa May and Chancellor Phillip Hammond prompted fear of an imminent cryptocurrencies crack-down, and called for an urgrent regulation of trading. The prime minister also said that the government should be “looking very seriously” at all the criminal activities related to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. She declared:”‘I think in areas like cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin we should be looking at these very seriously precisely because of the way they can be used, particularly by criminals. ‘It is something that has been developing. I think it is something that we do need to look at.”
And the result of these words was that Bitcoin began a slide which saw it lose about 10 percent of its value as it dropped from a high of about $11,600 to a low of just over $10,500. XRP and all other cryptocurrencies have suffered the same fate, recording significant drops.
Chancellor Hammond said: ‘I am interested in Bitcoin. The Bank of England, as you know, among the central banks, has been leading on looking at Bitcoin. ‘Look, it is a very interesting, new development. I am – I think we should be cautious about Bitcoin.
And possibly, we do need to look at the way we regulate this environment before the amount of outstanding Bitcoin becomes large enough to be systemically important in the global economy. It’s not there yet, but it could get there soon. ‘What is really important is that in regulating cryptocurrencies, we don’t inadvertently constrain the potential of the technology that underlies it, the blockchain technology, which has a wider and more important application.’
After the market crashes caused by news that countries including France, Germany, South Korea, were introducing new laws to control the trading of digital currencies, the same thing happened with the declarations of the United Kingdom government.
What seems increasingly evident is that in the end, only cryptocurrencies that will be able to adapt to regulation and integrate into the existing economic system will survive.
