IOHK | WHY WE ARE BUILDING CARDANO | 06/28/2017    Regulation The harsh reality of all modern financial systems is that as they scale, they accumulate a need, or at least a desire, for regulation. This outcome is generally the result of recurrent collapses due to the negligence of some actor or cabal of actors in a marketplace. For example, the Knickerbocker Crisis of 1907 resulted in the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 as a lender of last resort. Another example is the excesses of the 1920s in the United States that resulted in a terrible financial collapse, the Great Depression. This collapse yielded the creation of the Securities Exchange Commission in 1934 in order to prevent a similar event or at least hold bad actors accountable. One can reasonably debate the need for, scope and efficacy of regulation, but one cannot deny its existence and the zeal with which major governments have enforced it. However, the challenge all regulators face as the world globalizes and cash becomes digital is two-pronged. First, which set of regulations should be supreme when dealing with a collection of jurisdictions? The antiquated notion of Westphalian sovereignty melts when a single transaction can touch three dozen countries in under a minute. Should it simply be whomever wields the most geopolitical influence? Second, improvements in privacy technology have created a digital arms race where it will become increasingly more difficult to even understand who has participated in a transaction, much less who owns a particular store of value. In a world where millions of dollars of assets can be controlled with nothing more than a secretly held 12-word mnemonic , how do you 15 enforce effective regulation? Like all financial systems, the Cardano protocol must have an opinion in its design over what is fair and reasonable. We have chosen to divide between individual rights and the rights of a marketplace. Individuals should always have sole access to their funds without coercion or civil asset forfeiture. This right has to be enforced because not all governments can be trusted not to abuse their sovereign power for the personal gain of corrupt politicians, as seen in Venezuela and Zimbabwe. Cryptocurrencies have to be engineered to the lowest common denominator. 15 See BIP39 https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawiki WHY WE ARE BUILDING CARDANO  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License Page 18 of 44