Bitcoin and crypto are entirely different things - that's why Gary Gensler and the SEC might be right about securities

Written as a City A.M. column in June 2023, the piece responds to a Westminster Hall debate held after a report by the All Party Parliamentary Group for Crypto and Digital Assets. The column notes that bitcoin made up around 50% of the crypto market yet received little attention in the report, although Dr Lisa Cameron MP referred to improvements in the sustainability of bitcoin mining. It argues that lawmakers needed to understand the differences between forms of digital money before regulating them.

The column contrasts bitcoin’s issuance, governed by a decentralised protocol, with crypto projects that relied on initial coin offerings or centralised control. It argues that only bitcoin can claim true decentralisation, which it sees as the reason the SEC was treating other tokens as securities, and describes bitcoin as a commodity money. It also presents CBDCs, as government-controlled programmable money, as the opposite of bitcoin’s principles.