By Marco Oehrl
Investing.com - It is well known that the crypto sector is like the Wild West, and so far the authorities have been working too slowly to implement appropriate regulation for Bitcoin, Ethereum and co.
The collapse of Terra and FTX left millions of investors aggrieved, which puts regulators under pressure to act. However, this could also lead to the eventual adoption of inappropriate regulatory approaches that overshoot the mark by a wide margin and miss the point.
U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren sees cryptos as a threat to national security and says they must be treated as such. In her view, this means that measures must be taken to completely remove privacy from crypto transactions.
All actors involved in the process of transactions should be considered financial institutions, so they will be required to record all personal data of their users.
This type of control and monitoring is likely to fall on receptive ears in Europe, which is important in terms of globally uniform regulation.
Under the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) Regulation, which was adopted as a draft in the summer, the European Union agreed that crypto exchanges would have to report transactions to wallets outside their scope if they exceed a value of €1,000.
In addition, regulations to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing are to be extended to the crypto sector. Crypto exchanges will then be obliged to allow transactions involving unhosted wallets only if the identities of the sender and recipient are clarified beyond doubt. This makes anonymous transactions almost impossible.
At this point, there is a great deal of agreement with the regulatory approach Elizabeth Warren has in mind.
Industry expert Ryan Sean Adams feels this approach is outrageous, as it would turn America into a surveillance state:
"Instead of relying on the values of our Constitution, we are following China into a half-assed digital authoritarianism."
Reflexivity Research co-founder Will Clemente, meanwhile, contends that such surveillance would not have prevented the FTX bankruptcy.
How could it? Records of capital flows around crypto exchanges cannot prevent them from running into financial trouble. FTX held licenses in many countries, including the US and EU. This did not protect its users.
Bitcoin technical price markers
Bitcoin is currently losing -0.84% at a BTC/USD price of $17,658, while the weekly gain is 5.12%.
On Wednesday, the cryptocurrency managed to overcome the 55-day MA with a daily high of $18,351. However, the daily close was again below the MA and the 38.2% Fibo retracement of $17,841. A second breakout attempt above the resistance area failed and losses toward the support of the 23.6% Fibo retracement of $16,986 are looming.
Only if the mentioned resistance area can be overcome sustainably, an extension of the recovery towards the 50% Fibo retracement of $18,533 becomes possible.