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Great article Mike, as usual. Looking forward to the follow-up article:

"The gist of the next part, if I can sum it up now, is that assuming everything is true, if financial criminals could do this even under the supposed watchful eye of central banks, monetary authorities, and global financial regulators, why would these regulators not impose the strictest possible measure for cryptocurrencies, whose transactions are mostly out of their purview?"

It is my strong opinion that, in fact, the reason cryptocurrencies are superior is because fiat currencies require a third party (a bank) to do transactions while cryptocurrencies do not. With cryptocurrencies, the ledgers are open (although there are options that allow for privacy) and easy to verify; with banks, you need the bank (which means a person in the bank) to confirm amounts in your account. In other words, in cryptocurrencies we trust the blockchain (which is immutable, meaning once a transaction is confirmed it cannot be modified); whereas with fiat we have to trust a bank.

I am not saying that banks cannot be trusted, all I am saying is that there is a big difference between trusting everybody who work in the bank, and trusting an algorithm. I would rather trust an algorithm than anybody who works for a bank, who I do not even know.

This story about Wirecard I think perfectly illustrates the problem with fiat money. Wirecard claimed they had $2B (which now we know is not true). Ernst and Young couldn't verify the existence of that money, and neither could KPMG. If this were a cryptocurrency matter, we wouldn't need EY nor KPMG to confirm - all we had to do is inspect the blockchain (and each blockchain has a website where this is very easy to do). Then all that Wirecard had to do (if they were a cryptocurrency business), would be to prove that they own that address (account) in which that large amount is deposited. This is also very easy to do and there are several ways to do it (from signing of a digital document to sending a small amount to a given address).

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