Hartwig Loger is the Finance Minister for Austria, and he has a set of proposals for cryptocurrency standards that have been tried and tested already — for gold metal and its derivatives. His goal is to make sure cryptocurrencies like bitcoin cannot be used for money laundering. Last week Loger traveled to Lisbon, Portugal, to confer with his colleague, Mario Centeno, who is the Finance Minister for Portugal, about a Europe-wide union of financial regulations specifically for cryptocurrencies currently in use, and for those in the developmental stage. Loger says he expects such rules and regulations to be going into effect by mid-summer of 2018, if he can get at least six other European countries to go along with his plan.
Sources close to Loger say the discussions with Centeno were very productive and positive, including agreement that the EU Commission, based in Brussels, will be the center of a committee to standardize the proposed cryptocurrency regulations, with a major focus on how to prevent money laundering and investor fraud through cryptocurrency’s complicated cyber platforms. Loger is quoted as saying that bitcoin and ethereum, among others, are being manipulated in Austria, to his certain knowledge, in fraud amounting to millions of dollars each day. He mentioned specifically a recent bitcoin pyramid scheme that cost Austrian and German investors millions of euros. Loger is already scheduling a meeting in Vienna for March where leading crypto experts can begin putting together a strategy, based on metal investing procedures, to discourage further crypto scams.
