While attending the MIT Bitcoin Expo this past weekend, I was afforded the opportunity to sit down with Timothy Massad, Research Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and former Chairman of the U.S. Commodities and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). 

Massad served as the head of the CFTC from 2014 to 2017, and it was under his leadership that bitcoin was classified as a commodity.

In recent years, Massad has shared his thoughts on what regulation around bitcoin and digital assets should look like. He’s appeared on Bloomberg to discuss the matter, and he recently testified at the first Senate Banking Subcommittee hearing on Digital Assets.

Massad considers the need to balance user privacy when using public blockchains with the need for the U.S. government to monitor the networks for illicit activities as one the biggest challenges that regulators currently face — and he doesn’t claim to have the answer as to how this is best accomplished.

He explained that it’s important that people cannot see the balance of our funds or the entirety of our transaction history when we do something as trivial as paying for a cup of coffee with a digital asset.

In our conversation, he stated that the innovator who develops the technology that finds this balance will have found the “holy grail.”

You can watch the interview here: