Crypto & Digital Assets: Hubris, Nemesis, Catharsis

Crypto & Digital Assets: Hubris, Nemesis, Catharsis
Webinar

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The events of the past 18 months, the crash in cryptocurrency prices and prominent crypto failures such as those of Terra/Luna, Celsius and FTX, might have been expected to sound the death knell on crypto and crypto assets. Far from it. We are still in hubris. The promotion of “responsible” crypto has been gaining not losing strength, notably with the UK government announcing in April 2022 its plans to make the UK a global crypto asset technology hub and promote a UK market in crypto assets (or digital assets, as they are often more politely referred especially in legal circles). This talk explains why the current promotion of crypto and digital assets is fundamentally flawed, failing to recognise the key distinction between permissionless and permissioned data records. Nemesis will follow. Catharsis, necessary to achieve real economic value from the new cryptographic based technologies, requires recognising the niche nature of permissionless blockchain, with valid but limited application outside the framework of law and regulation. The future is not a digital asset revolution, but the evolution of traditional financial record keeping to embrace permissioned data access and sharing, with all the challenges of data governance that this entails.

Supporting paper

“The law and regulation of digital assets” to be available to webinar attendees.

Speaker:

Professor Alistair Milne is Professor of Financial Economics at the School of Business and Economics, Loughborough University, He previously worked at Cass Business School, the Bank of England; the University of Surrey, London Business School, HM Treasury and for the Government of Malawi. He holds a PhD in economics from the London School of Economics. He has conducted research for more than three decades on financial technology, bank capital and risk management, macroeconomics and financial regulation. He is the author of a comprehensive account of the 2007-08 global financial crisis “The Fall of the House of Credit”. His current research focus on the emerging innovations in banking and insurance including the application of AI, distributed ledger and related data technologies. He is the principal investigator of the TECHNGI project www.techngi.uk part of the £20mn Next Generation Services Research Challenge supported by the UK government’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund. He has also worked on disaster risk finance https://floodfinjava.lboro.ac.uk/ and this has led him to write on the potential application of insurance solutions to the current Covid-19 and future pandemics.

Date
Wednesday, 17 May 2023

Time
11:00 - 11:45 BST

Cost
Free