SEC Wants to Know Your Crypto Secrets 🤫

Right. The SEC, those delightful folk, are now peering at your cryptocurrency with an unnervingly focused gaze. They’ve decided to have a ’roundtable’, which is what happens when bureaucrats need to look busy while simultaneously pretending they understand something involving binary code.

SEC’s Roundtable: Because Privacy is SO Last Century

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), bless their regulatory hearts, announced on the eighth of September (a perfectly ordinary day, statistically speaking) that their Crypto Task Force will be hosting a gathering – a roundtable, you understand – concerning financial surveillance and privacy. It’s to be held in Washington, D.C. on October 17th, running from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., which is approximately the time most sensible people are considering tea and biscuits. Apparently, the intention is to illuminate how technology can… well, let’s just say ‘help’ regulators ‘address risks’. That’s bureaucrat-speak for “keep an eye on things”. 🧐

The Financial Surveillance and Privacy roundtable will bring together panelists who are at the forefront of developing technologies designed to protect individual privacy… whilst simultaneously providing a comprehensive overview to those wishing to *not* protect your privacy. It will also facilitate an in-depth discussion on policy matters related to financial surveillance. (Because what’s policy without a little surveillance?)

Commissioner Hester M. Peirce, who, rather bravely, heads the Crypto Task Force, has stated that technology which helps you keep your financial affairs to yourself is “critically important.” It appears she believes people might actually *want* to control who knows about their hard-earned (or cleverly mined) digital monies. Novel concept, wouldn’t you say? She also says understanding these privacy tools will “assist the SEC” – which, translated, means “let us figure out how to circumvent them”. The event is open to the public, provided you register and submit to security checks. Just your standard level of inconvenience for participating in the joys of regulation. 🙄

This whole Task Force thing started on January 21st, 2025, under Acting SEC Chairman Mark T. Uyeda, with the lofty goal of ditching the rather unsubtle “regulation by enforcement” approach that has, shall we say, ruffled a few feathers. They aim to provide “clearer” rules (though clarity is often the first casualty of bureaucracy), “disclosure standards” (more paperwork, naturally), and a more “effective” targeting of those naughty crypto-offenders. They’ve already had a go at defining what *is* a crypto asset, covered DeFi, tokenization, custody… It’s been a regular whirlwind of roundtables. They’ve even ventured out into the wild, holding sessions in Dallas, Boston, and New York. It’s all terribly… thorough. 🐢 Perhaps a bit too thorough? One wonders if they aren’t just creating a new set of rules for everyone to misunderstand.

2025-09-09 05:58

SEC’s Roundtable: Because Privacy is SO Last Century

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