This is a fascinating article from Bloomberg. If you do not want to read the history section, skip about half-way down in the article, but to be honest the entire editorial is a worthwhile read. The below extract is spot on!
As Harold James says, we are living through a monetary revolution as profound as the one that swept away the remains of the gold standard. But there is a difference. In the 1970s and 1980s, the attempts by governments to regulate the revolution were swept away. Nixon’s price and wage controls were an abject failure, just as the economist Milton Friedman (and Shultz) had foreseen. Under Reagan, it was deregulation that enabled American financial institutions to become the dominant players in international markets.
The winners of my boyhood have become the bloated incumbents of my middle age. The innovative energy has passed to the crypto bros, leaving the established banks and their friends in Washington scrambling to make the barriers to competition even higher. If cryptocurrency is indeed the internet of money, then we are still at quite an early stage of its development. Restrictive regulation in the mid 1990s might have strangled in its infancy the commercialization of the world wide web. Restrictive regulation of crypto could turn out to be a very expensive mistake.
