France’s ‘Monsieur Bitcoin’: We Should Not Directly Regulate Cryptocurrency

France’s “Monsieur Bitcoin” Jean-Pierre Landau released an initial report into cryptocurrency July 5, claiming it was “neither desirable nor necessary” to regulate the technology.

Government official and academic Landau consciously compares “technological” and “financial” innovation in the report, which runs to over one hundred pages. Some of the conclusions may come as a surprise to industry commentators, Landau arguing that over-regulation of cryptocurrency would constitute a “three-pronged danger.”

“Direct regulation is not desirable as it would oblige us to define, classify and therefore constrict objects which are essentially fluid and still unidentified,” he wrote in a summary section on cryptocurrency. The report continues: