If there is to be integration and some regulation of Stablecoins to allow them to be used as part of a wider digital payment system, it can't come soon enough.
Exchanges need to be brought into the current financial systems framework, if nothing else, to stop the fraudulent activity that blights the brave new world of crypto currencies.
The UK treasury announced plans to legalise the use of unspecified stable coins for online payments but it is not the utility that pleases me as much as the fact that this will bring the exchanges into the financial fold along with the traditional payment providers, institutions and merchants. What this means is there will be more fraud protection and safeguards in place to protect more vulnerable and often elderly users who manage to get duped into losing, in some cases, everything they have to crypto scammers who offer ridiculous returns and can scam and dupe into investing in fake schemes after transferring their cash into crypto accounts and then away into privacy coins, never giving the victim a chance or any possibility of law enforcement to recover the proceeds of the crime.
It's a sad fact that without better voluntary checks and balances in place to stop the endless cheating and fraud within the crypto domain, this new financial model and way of seamlessly and safely moving token payments for goods and services will never become a viable replacement for the current systems.
Paradoxically, it is the current centralised financial system which is both creating and trying to solve these issues. In the case Graeme Stagg, a 77-year-old former RAF Officer who lost £800000 to scammers after using his savings and selling his house before transferring the whole lot to the scammers, including £500000 sent to various Kraken crypto accounts over a period of just 26 days without any of the banks or exchange flagging up what were obviously unusual transactions.
In the rush to get rid of cash transactions in the UK, it appears it is actually becoming easier to move money around electronically, with a feeling of apathy created by safeguards in place that such transactions are easily traceable.
There will be those of course that say we all have to take total responsibility for actions we carry out through our own free will and I can understand this to some extent, but not everyone has the same levels of intelligence or even resource to check through complicated and unfamiliar new systems 100%. Like everyone here on Leo, most people want more abundance and can you really blame an old fella who is promised a much better return on his investments than he can earn in a bank account paying less than 1% interest?
The other mitigating issue is that psychological manipulation is a very real and tangible tool that we all fall for daily to a lesser or greater extent, mainly in the form of advertising. In most cases, we might end up buying a new chocolate bar we had no intention of buying before we entered a shop or being tempted into that 'buy 2 get 1free' offer but it's the same principle at play, even though the numbers are much smaller.
Most of us will have made a mistake in our crypto life or been the victim of a rug pull or going back a couple of years, a dodgy ICO but we have sadly just accepted the risk, shrugged our shoulders and moved on.
The question we need to be asking is: Is this acceptable risk? If not, are we prepared to accept more government regulation to mitigate this risk? Or the best response in my opinion is:
What more can we do within the crypto sphere to stop these scammers and thieves from permanently tarnishing our brave new world?
