Blockchain mustn’t get blocked: Regulate but do not ban Bitcoin

Since I started writing this column on technology a couple of years ago, two things have been eminently predictable. One is Elon Musk, the richest man in the world now, doing unpredictable things: Boring tunnels, implanting chips in pigs’ brains, and christening his son unpronounceably. The second is the unpredictability of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency—volatile, erratic, yo-yoing between $3,000 and $50,000 in this short time, and being simultaneously hailed as the next big thing or dismissed as a ‘digital tulip’, as speculative as the tulip mania of the mid-1600s. So, it was interesting when the two came together in a rather risqué cartoon tweeted by Musk, showing a pious priest getting distracted by an unusually clad lady with the word ‘bitcoin’ written over a certain part of her anatomy.

A few days later, Tesla announced that it had bought $1.5 billion of Bitcoin and will soon accept cryptocurrency as legitimate payment for its cars. Mastercard followed by announcing that it will incorporate ‘select cryptocurrencies’ on its global payment network. BNY Mellon, incidentally the US’s oldest bank, announced holding and transferring digital currencies for asset management clients. JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs announced executive positions to look at cryptocurrencies. Even the iconoclastic mayor of Miami, US, tweeted that his city would accept taxes in Bitcoin.