Angela Eagle

You are in the regulated space and this is a load of quite alarming stuff going on beyond the regulatory perimeter, which may well be affecting very young consumers, maybe in school, who are being conned out of their money by these things and are learning particular ways of being able to invest, which are pretty horrendous. It might not be your direct duty to do something, because it is not regulated, but how does the system pick up that kind of looming threat outside of the perimeter and try to at least be aware of it? Would you not really worry too much unless the Government decided in some ways to regulate in this area?

That is true. Blockchain has certainly been around for quite a while. Its use has implications for transparency and for the levels of employment that there might be in the old, more bureaucratic banks.

The systems that control financial services have to deal with the practical and philosophical issues that arise, such as whether digital coins are ever stable, what central banks ought to be doing to deal with that, and whether the wild west of Bitcoin and the rest should be left as a gambling thing on the side. Those markets can be volatile—the wild west—but the capacity of software such as open registers and blockchain, and their potential for transparency and in-time and open trading of all sorts of things, could be harnessed for good purposes as well as for the more nefarious ones that feature on the darker edges of the net. On top of that, the demands of climate change will cause a systemic change in the way that things are valued, priced and assessed for value.