Sure.
It's really important that people who purchase these kinds of assets know what they're purchasing and know what an asset is. When you think of a currency, a currency is something that you can store value in; you can use it at a store to buy goods and services; and you can be reasonably sure of what the value is going to be from one day to the next, as you can with the Canadian dollar. That's why we target inflation, so that households don't need to worry about that kind of fluctuation in the value of the holdings they have.
If it's an asset, you may hold it for a variety of other reasons, as you hold other investments. You may hold it because you think you have a stake in a company. I'm thinking about an initial coin offering, on which I may earn a high return over time. I might hold something like Bitcoin, and I may hold a return on that over time as well. When you're a purchaser of that and you're a household, you need to know what kind of risk is associated with that and you need to know also that you have the same guardrails that are in place for investor protection and consumer protection with respect to other assets.
What I have been saying, as have the governor and the G20 countries, in fact, is that it's really the right time to start to put in place a regulatory structure that provides those guardrails, whether it's guardrails against anti-money laundering or terrorist financing, or just guardrails to make sure that investors know what they're getting into.
In order to do that, the best approach is for regulators and concerned parties in Canada to get together and think about how we're going to define these things, how we're going to treat them in our current regulatory environment, and also to do that internationally, because these are cross-border assets. They're being traded all over the world, so if we're not consistent across the world, then we're likely to be faced with regulatory arbitrage.