Crypto ATMs Spared the Guillotine, Handed a Lightly Worded Warning Instead

The Government has abandoned its plan to ban cryptocurrency ATMs outright, announcing instead a “targeted and proportionate” regulatory framework. Associate Justice Minister Nicole McKee framed the reversal as considered policy refinement rather than a backdown, which is one way to describe replacing a ban with a set of guardrails after the ban had already been floated in public. The machines, previously destined for the chopping block, will now simply be watched more closely.

The Beehive’s own press release described the outcome as “guardrails, not the guillotine”, a phrase that does a great deal of work disguising the fact that the guillotine was the Government’s own idea a matter of weeks ago. Targeted and proportionate is also, conveniently, indistinguishable from whatever the Government eventually decides to do, since almost any measure can be described that way after the fact by the minister who chose it.

Crypto ATM operators, who spent recent weeks preparing for extinction, can now prepare for a compliance form instead, which counts as a reprieve in this climate. The guillotine remains in storage, sharpened, should proportionate ever stop being convenient. Nobody involved has explained what changed between the ban being announced and the ban being un-announced, other than the word being used to describe it.