The list of worries is long: illegal initial coin offerings, money laundering, tax evasion, cyberthefts, exchange outages, excessive speculation and more. These risks may have been easy for authorities to overlook when Bitcoin and its peers sat on the far fringes of finance, but cryptocurrencies are moving ever closer to the mainstream.
The stakes are much higher now that everyone from mom-and-pop investors to Wall Street banks are piling in. Adding to the challenge is the question of how to define cryptocurrencies, with little agreement on whether they’re currencies, commodities or something entirely new.
