The United States Attorney General’s Cyber-Digital Task Force recently unveiled the result of its months-long effort to evaluate emerging cryptocurrency-related threats and articulate law enforcement strategies for countering them. The resulting guidance leaves the reader with an impression that its authors have a sound understanding of how the focal asset class works as well as a certain fixation on the ways it can be misused, as some observers contend.
In the highly charged atmosphere of the final weeks before the presidential election, with high-profile enforcement actions against the people behind crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX and the U.S. government’s sweeping anti-monopoly push against Silicon Valley looming in the background, the Cryptocurrency Enforcement Framework seems like part of some larger political and regulatory dynamic. How does the release of the document fit into the grand scheme of things, and what message is it meant to convey?