Ben Lawsky, Superintendent of the New York Department of Financial Services, recently gave his final speech at the BITS Emerging Payments Forum on the regulation of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies.

"I'll be honest, I hadn't even heard the word Bitcoin until 2013, when our chief economist of the DFS one day in a meeting started  to tell me about it in the context of the banking crisis that was occurring in Cyprus."

- Lawsky

Lawsky describes the current state of affairs between regulated finance and technology as a collision.  "That collision of course between that unregulated [technology] sector with that very conservatively carefully regulated bank sector, that collision isn't always going to be pretty. At least at first. But we both as regulators and technologists have a responsibility to find common ground and work together in good faith."

Lawsky stated in his speech, that developing the new rules of the road for the BitLicense was extraordinarily difficult.  "As you can probably imagine, people generally do not go into a career in financial regulation because they want to work on cutting edge technology issues."

"It is important for regulators to work quickly, but carefully to learn everything they can about these new technologies as they emerge."

- Lawsky

Lawsky explained that  he received support, and insight, from a number of Bitcoin related companies in the finalization of the regulation. One of these companies was Circle, a consumer Internet company focused on secure and less costly technology for storing and using money.