{"id":203304,"date":"2017-10-06T07:23:24","date_gmt":"2017-10-06T05:23:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=203304"},"modified":"2017-10-06T07:23:24","modified_gmt":"2017-10-06T05:23:24","slug":"digital-currencies-dangerous-and-deeply-dubious-says-european-central-bank-council-member","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/banking\/203304\/digital-currencies-dangerous-and-deeply-dubious-says-european-central-bank-council-member\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital currencies \u201cdangerous and deeply dubious\u201d says European Central Bank council member"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Regulators across the globe are increasingly taking an interest in initial coin offerings, with European Central Bank Governing Council member Ewald Nowotny being the latest to weigh in.<\/p>\n<p>The ECB is discussing putting \u201cconcrete legal restrictions in place\u201d as the hype around digital currencies like bitcoin is \u201cdangerous and deeply dubious,\u201d Nowotny said in an interview with Austrian weekly magazine Trend.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s unclear what those legal restrictions may be and what powers the ECB has over ICOs. What\u2019s clear though, is that central banks are likely to be skeptical about a technology that was created to bypass them.<\/p>\n<p>While China and South Korea went as far as banning the fundraising mechanism, most watchdogs have taken a cautious approach, saying some digital tokens are securities and should be regulated accordingly, without providing an actual framework or list of requirements to define which projects fall in which category.<\/p>\n<p>Beyond issuing those words of caution, there hasn\u2019t been a broad-ranging crackdown of tokens that do qualify as securities.<\/p>\n<p>Switzerland took that path last week, with its financial regulator saying it\u2019s investigating a number of ICOs; that probably sounded off alarm bells across the crypto community since Zug has become a popular hub for issuing digital coins. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission issued a similar warning back in July.<\/p>\n<p>While ICOs slowed in August, after the SEC statement, they\u2019ve picked up again, signaling developers aren\u2019t too worried about regulators increasingly peering in.<\/p>\n<p><a  data-lightbox=\"post-image\" href=\"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/Crypto-1.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-203306\" src=\"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/Crypto-1.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1200\" height=\"587\" srcset=\"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/Crypto-1.png 1200w, https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/Crypto-1-300x147.png 300w, https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/Crypto-1-768x376.png 768w, https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/Crypto-1-1024x501.png 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>Read:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Regulators across the globe are increasingly taking an interest in initial coin offerings, with European Central Bank Governing Council member Ewald Nowotny being the latest to weigh in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":178167,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[961],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-203304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-banking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203304"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":203308,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203304\/revisions\/203308"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/178167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}