European Central Bank

The European Central Bank is too busy attacking Bitcoin to worry about the myriad of real scams perpetrated by con artists in the industry.

FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in jail. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak just won an appeal against YouTube and the use of his likeness in promoting cryptocurrency scams on the site. Crypto scammers (or the platforms they use) are increasingly getting caught and held accountable for their actions. Cryptocurrency is mainstream, meaning mainstream attention to coins, tokens, or platforms that seem “too good to be true” is met with widespread awareness that they are, indeed, too good to be true.

Unfortunately, as cryptocurrency regains popularity, more scams will appear. And one popular regulatory approach — criticizing Bitcoin (BTC) — is only serving to push more people into criminals’ clutches. I have personally been impersonated on social media due to my association with blockchain, and the criminals behind it attempted to swindle funds from my followers and friends. Despite filing police reports and injunctions, no progress has been made in catching them.

There are plenty of problems in cryptocurrency that are well worth attacking. But from Europe to the United States, regulators fight the same straw “bogeyman” of Bitcoin. The European Central Bank’s latest comments serve as an example: "Bitcoin has failed on the promise to be a global decentralized digital currency and is still hardly used for legitimate transfer,” ECB officials Ulrich Bindseil and Jürgen Schaaf wrote in a post for the ECB’s blog.

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