The QuadrigaCX affair continued to grab mainstream media headlines this week, while China’s race to adopt blockchain was also worthy of attention, as well as a revealing UK report that found most Brits still haven’t a clue about crypto. To be fair though, they have bigger worries.
QuadrigaCX Takes the Limelight
The QuadrigaCX story has, unsurprisingly, continued to gain traction in the mainstream news, which isn’t really a surprise seeing as it is, all told, an intriguing mystery that seems to deepen almost every day. The coverage mainly focused on the news that EY had finally been able to access the cold wallets, which should have held some $137 million worth of crypto, but were instead empty of the expected funds, having been rinsed almost a year ago. This latest development made it far and side, from NPR to the BBC via the MIT Technology Review, with everyone seemingly wanting to get a bit out of this case that would be enough to being Sherlock Holmes out of retirement.
Blockchain Revolution Favors China
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the hype around blockchain that contributed to the 2017 bull run has made way for “a new era of mundane usefulness for the distributed ledger”. It cites pilots going into production, real-world smart contract applications and state-backed cryptocurrencies as three examples of the much quieter revolution that blockchain is ushering in underneath the stories of a year’s worth of price crashes. Despite this revolution, the Washington Post reported that “China is racing ahead of the United States on blockchain”. It is well known that China has grand designs for blockchain and sees it as a way to both alleviate a negatively shifting economy and steal a march on other super powers in terms of technology, and the post seems to have woken up to what that means for both China and America:
If China can be first and build a blockchain system it controls, such as it did with its state-controlled Internet, Beijing will be able to use the technology to repress its people, expand its influence and subvert the Western rule-of-law-based system.
Brits are Clueless on Crypto
Reuters reported Thursday that the UK’s markets watchdog, The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), had published research on consumers’ current views on cryptocurrencies, which threw up some interesting attitudes. In the main, very few knew anything about crypto, much less how it worked, and many still saw it as a ‘get rich quick’ scheme, despite the British media having revelled in the collapse in prices over the past year. Despite the portents of doom from a year’s worth of negative reporting however, the FCA found a different attitude:
But the FCA said the overall scale of harm may not be as high as previously thought, a finding that should stall the introduction of draconian new rules for now.
Well who would’ve thought it – maybe Bitcoin’s not going to kill us after all? Although Brexit might…
