Michael Held: US regulations and approaches to cryptocurrencies

Remarks by Mr Michael Held, Executive Vice President of the Legal Group of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, at the BIS Central Bank Legal Experts' Meeting, Basel, 3 December 2019.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

Thank you, Diego, for "volunteering" me to speak about digital currencies-a field in which I count myself as very much a trainee, not an expert. Today I will focus on the U.S. regulatory landscape for digital currencies, in particular on digital currencies issued by private organizations that are intended to be used like money. As always, the views I express are my own, not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System.

Policy makers and regulators in the United States, to date, have not developed an overarching framework for regulating private digital currencies. The field has been seen as too new for a comprehensive regulatory response. To be sure, the digital nature of new private currencies will raise challenges to which policy makers must respond. In my view, however, we spend so much time wrestling with the novelty of digital currencies that we forget that private currency is nothing new. The theme of my talk today is accordingly best encapsulated by a quote that is attributed-perhaps wrongly-to Mark Twain: "History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme."