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In the list of Top Gainers on the website CoinGecko, near the top of the list, I noticed was crypto called Palestine Finance. I am making no judgments on the organization's worthiness; however, I know that Palestinian organizations are on the United States world terrorist identification list. I am not a financial regulatory specialist, but I believe that it is against the law to aid these organizations in accessing funding in fiat currencies, as well it should be if they are indeed terrorist organizations. This brings up an interesting issue; crypto's strength is being decentralized, but where does it stand on being regulated? I said I was not a financial regulatory specialist; however, I am a medical device manufacturing collateral duty regulatory specialist. I imagine the finance world is over-regulated just as the medical device manufacturing world, but these regulations have important purposes. Cryptocurrencies are not regulated, so one shouldn't expect them to prevent undesirable activities such as funding terrorist organizations? It is my desire, as I am sure would be the popular desire that any regulation activities are decentralized in some manner. In my opinion, governmental regulation of medical device manufacturing by the FDA (in America) is far from honest or effective. In many situations, the people representing the government in audits were previously on the manufacturing side, and/or the people on the manufacturing side were previously governmental auditors. This is sort of like the dog watching the henhouse previously being a wolf that the farmer domesticated. Even worse is that the workload of the FDA is so over-burdened with audits due to the vast number of medical devices hitting the market, they now outsource some of the audits to third-party vendors. Now we have the wolf's cousin watching the henhouse. So, what is the solution?
Cryptocurrencies are global and do not respect borders which would make regulation extremely difficult at best. Currency holders also remain anonymous, which makes accountability near impossible. Any attempt at regulation could result in fierce litigation to prevent it; however, the crypto leaders would need to organize in some manner to present a unified defense that goes against the intent of the entire system. As previously mentioned, important aspects need some oversight to protect people from criminal activities that impact the holders and even terrorist activities that impact the world.
A growing trend in medical device manufacturing regulation is for regulatory bodies like the International Standards Organization (ISO) to write regulations that define the purpose of the regulation without defining how to achieve the purpose. They even welcome representatives from manufacturers to participate in the creation and updating of these regulations. It is truly a collaborative effort, with one side protecting the effectiveness of the regulations and the other side protecting the efficiency of the execution to comply. This model may be best with the first collaboration between a newly defined regulatory body and leaders of various cryptocurrencies being one to define the basic requirements for regulations such as "a process to prevent funding of terrorist watchlist organizations." It is obvious that even this one requirement could spur many activities like: determining a watchlist; how often to update it; reviews after updates; oversight of transactions; and so on. It may be a necessary evil with others to come. The only certainty is uncertainty and change will happen. What will we do to get ahead of the change?
