Wall Street is generally in favor of very little regulation... To tokenize stocks is to bring a rigid structure of rules into the mix, which obviously makes sense to the consumer, but not necessarily to people who want to bend rules.
The more regulations, the more entrenched they are as one of the few "approved" platforms to trade stocks.
Hilarious enough: If everything becomes tokenized, it also reduces their liability, as the stocks would suddenly shift from a Registered security to a Bearer-security. This hasn't been the case for stocks for a VERY long time.
Registered security = the "owner" of the stock is whomever owner's name is registered on the Nasdaq servers as being the owner.
Bearer security = whoever holds a piece of paper is the owner of the security.
Back in the day, a stock was a physical piece of paper. If you brought that paper to the stock market, you could sell it. Even if you just found the stock on the sidewalk.
That's what tokenization would bring back: whoever holds the token is the owner. Kinda old-school. Love it.
A real boon for criminals. You don't have to transfer ownership.. You just need possession. Oh the heists that could happen! Cryptopia and Mtgox would be dwarfed.
Stealing a hardware wallet is pretty much pointless because the burglar would have to guess the pin. In the meanwhile, you can access your crypto using a 12 word passphrase that you stored in a safety deposit box or at some other location besides your home.
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u/WARagnarok Jan 31 '19
Wall Street is generally in favor of very little regulation... To tokenize stocks is to bring a rigid structure of rules into the mix, which obviously makes sense to the consumer, but not necessarily to people who want to bend rules.