Financially Ever After: A Thesis on Cryptocurrency and the Global Financial Economy

Abstract

This paper reveals the struggle for regulatory balance between ensuring progressive innovation and stifling fraudulent sophistry in the emerging disruptive blockchain economy. With a particular focus on cryptocurrencies, it envisions a practical solution in technological advancement that combines economic considerations and monetary policy in the roll-out of and implementation of a framework for the health of the financial economy - the Competitive Popularity Approach (CPA). The CPA framework is a three-part framework that draws from elements of market capitalisation, competitive business strategies and technological advancement to encourage innovation while maintaining regulatory supervision over the financial sector. It considers the possibility of harnessing technological advancement by providing a theoretical incentive for developing a multi-dimensional, self-regulating ecosystem through the promising potential of blockchain technology in order to achieve a semblance of the balance we desire. With the state adoption of the core tenets of this framework on a sufficiently international scale, the financial sector may witness an exponential transformation for the better. The framework essentially directs us to create, integrate and regulate. This may sound simple but is in fact a complex, intricate web of details which are not as easy to achieve. The paper discusses this framework in a manner that is neither perfect nor complete. At best, it could be described as skeletal. This is necessarily the consequence of the relatively nascent state of the technology in spite of its ground-breaking potential. There is still a lot about the technology that we have to uncover, uncertainties about the effectiveness of legal manoeuvres we have to experiment, and a number of factors we may have not even foreseen yet to even regard as worth considering. The debate has only just begun. Whether or not the blockchain economy will live up to the revolution it is predicted to create is still riddled with uncertainty. Yet regardless of what policymakers ultimately decide, there is no denying that this phenomenon is not disappearing anytime soon. It is hoped that the CPA framework will jumpstart a chain reaction for a discussion that will inspire us to take a step towards a bold new normal financially ever after.