Steven Mnuchin, the American Treasury Secretary, has been talking about the international trading of cryptocurrencies. At a meeting in Washington of its Economic Club on January 12th, The Secretary expressed concern over Bitcoin wallets, suggesting that they had the potential to act like Swiss bank accounts.

Mnuchin announced his intention of working with the G20 countries to supply US tracking facilities, which would circumvent the anonymous activity of digital currencies. In this, he is acting in the belief that Bitcoin is a company like a bank, which is obliged to know its customers. What he doesn\'t appear to understand is that not all Bitcoin wallets are hosted by a company, as such, as the whole system is designed to operate on a peer to peer basis.

Many governments and national financial bodies are currently looking into a mechanism for regulating cryptocurrencies, as they naturally want to control the system and, hopefully, tax it. The very name, crypto (from the Greek, meaning hidden), explains why this idea would go down like a lead balloon in the industry.

Bitcoin\'s raison d\'être is the decentralised ledger system, which relies on self-regulation by its own community as the best method for keeping the system honest and transparent. If the system were subject to central control, this would no longer be possible, and all sorts of other problems would arise.