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Comment Re:And when some of the "stable" coin co's (Score 1) 79

OK, this is the difference between how Paypal is regulated in the US (as you describe) and how it is regulated in Europe.
The actual effect of the regulation in terms of what it requires Paypal to do is essentially the same (at a high level, obviously the specifics are different) in both places, but the starting point for the respective governments in how they arrived that this point is very different.

In Europe, the idea was that in the future people might get issued with some sort of hardware wallet which stored money in a cryptographic form, and people could transfer portions of that money to other wallet holders. The regulations were drawn up with this in mind, but they also allowed for an alternative system where the money value was stored on a central server rather than on the device. This latter alternative is what everyone, including Paypal, went with, so that is how Paypal are regulated in Europe.

We had a system called Mondex which was trialled in Swindon, England, which wasn't in itself a success, but the technology was sold to Mastercard, and ended up being incorporated into Mastercard contactless debit cards (which is server-based rather than stored on the card). Stablecoins are essentially the original Mondex idea, but with the double-spend problem solved, so are exactly what the European Parliament had in mind when they put the Electronic Money Directive into law.

Comment Re:And when some of the "stable" coin co's (Score 1) 79

Stablecoins should be regulated in the same way that the likes of Paypal is regulated.
In Europe that is as an electronic money issuer, and when the European Parliament was drafting those regulations about 25 years ago, they had in mind something more like stablecoins than what we actually got with PayPal, Wise, and similar. In the USA, it is as a money transfer agent.

Comment Re: Join the ponzi stampede, everyone (Score 1) 79

You deposit a dollar in a bank. The bank lends out the dollar, and the borrower spends it on something.
The recipient of the spending has a dollar. You feel that you have a dollar because it is deposited in a bank, and you can transfer it to someone else's bank account in the same way that you could spend a dollar, and people will accept that as a 1:1 substitute for a dollar.

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