Should we prioritise policy development re cryptocurrencies & blockchains?

Having just read back over this thread. What exactly is the benefit to a crypto currency that outweighs the risks?

None that I can find. The idea that it's better than state money has been proven wrong for centuries.

Gov't needs to simply allow it to exist and see what happens. Blockchain technology is a technology akin to the internet itself. There is no need to regulate any of the cryptocurrencies.

It would be great if the banking industry wasn't so against it here and actually held bitcoin/ethereum/dash balances. Forget the anonymous angles, if there is a link between a cryptocurrency address and the real world, there is no anonymity. And for anyone wanting to do anything practical with it nearly all transactions are going to link to the real world, be it a business or an individual. Already have laws to get information from these entities. There is always a link between the value of a Bitcoin & NZD at a point in time, so if the issue is one of Income Tax etc well it can be calculated, just like if someone earned USD. This tech is not magical.

There are upcoming projects like Skycoin (Obelisk), IOTA (The Tangle), Tezos that are attempting to move away from the electricity usage of securing the blockchains. To that end the only usefulness of a Government operated blockchain is for some kind of public ledger or chain of events, perhaps Voting? However once that becomes a goal usually all that is being created is a distributed database and the tools already exist to do that without getting into Blockchain. Where Blockchain makes sense is when there is no central authority. The network needs to operate in this mode "crap the genie is out of the bottle now, we can't stop this even if we wanted to" (like how Bittorrent has destroyed the music gatekeepers business model and if the movie/tv industry don't pull their collective fingers out they'll end up in a similar state), once a Blockchain gets to that point then it becomes useful. Auspost/CSIRO are looking into uses as well.

So any Government Blockchain ideas really need to be implemented on existing networks, maintaining a proprietary one is pretty useless. Government already has a state controlled currency in the NZD, so no need to go and invent a new one (if it is really necessary, can simply create a digital NZD [which would exist on an existing network Ethereum/Skyledger/Tezos etc and would require the 1:1 exchange of analog NZD for digital NZD - none of this M2 money business], as well as paper it is bits [banks won't be happy about that though, they make lots of money on fees related to moving NZD around etc]).

OH, actually the one place that could really benefit from a blockchain solution is Land Titles/Asset Ownership. Preferably done on Skyledger_(Skycoin), Tezos _(coming soon), IOTA (maybe not), Ethereum (not so much, still a lot of electricity used in this network). Done properly the world would adopt it and it would become a standard of some kind. A lot of incentives in place to not do this of course, lots of value to be generated from obscurity etc.

been following cryptocurrency/blockchain developments technically since Feb 2011

Gov't needs to simply allow it to exist and see what happens.

We know what will happen as it's happened before - the economy collapses.

Government already has a state controlled currency in the NZD

No it doesn't. The NZ$ is controlled by the private banks. Some 98% of NZ$ are digital created by the private banks.

Quote from Auckland University Economics Professor on the NZ Herald finance writer's podcast yesterday: "People said no one would ever buy anything on the Internet. Resistance to bitcoin is like that." // "Bitcoin is the future"