Who Wants to Be Bitcoin’s Watchdog?

At a meeting with staff of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission late last year, Chairman J. Christopher Giancarlo ticked off a list of the watchdog agency’s achievements. Among them: It emerged as the federal overseer of digital currencies like bitcoin. For better or worse, Giancarlo added.

That may have been meant as a humorous aside, according to people who were there, but some in the crowd saw it as an unusually frank assessment. Cryptocurrency gives regulators a lot to be nervous about. Bitcoin prices are swinging wildly but are still up about 1,500 percent over the past year. It and other virtual tokens have captured the imaginations of investors who hope to get in on the money of the future, even though it’s challenging to actually buy things with digital cash. It’s also been widely viewed as a haven for illicit money. On Jan. 12, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin called on Group of 20 nations to make sure that cryptocurrencies don’t become the equivalent of an anonymous Swiss bank account.