Urszula McCormack (1): Hong Kong’s Digital Asset Compliance Challenges

Regulatory Ramblings

The advent of digital assets has taken an interesting path. These days, DeFi (decentralized finance), NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and CBDCs (central bank digital currencies) are the concepts and acronyms that are en vogue. Indeed, it now seems passe to speak of the genesis of it all in 2009, when someone named "Satoshi Nakamoto" released a paper entitled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System".

The release of the paper and the so-called innovations it has spawned are now being touted - even beyond the financial sector - to solve everything from environmental degradation, to the crisis of unaffordable housing in developed societies and even as a means to reduce hospital errors and fatalities.

Yet, to the average person on the street, past all the jargon, acronyms, and seemingly inaccessible, high-falutin discourse, what does all this techno-babble mean?

Ultimately, it's a means to get rich or more precisely, others are getting wealthy using this new technology and therefore, people feel compelled to jump on the bandwagon so as to not be left behind economically.

It begs the question: can the implicit promise and deepest aspirational goal of Satoshi's paper of fairer terms of transactional exchange - and consequently, a more just world through the use of Blockchain technology - ever truly be reached? Will the impact of such technology ever go beyond just creating e-currencies and payment systems whereby their effects will mainly be felt in financial and economic realms, or will they impact other aspects of the human condition?

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