Cayman has fought back by diversifying their economy. They have over 60 blockchain startups in Cayman Enterprise City. Our pathetic effort to turn Grand Bahama into a tech hub has totally failed, because of ignorance of what is needed at the highest levels.

Totally concur. Yet the government is a dunce when it comes to ICT. What they do, is try to hire a "silver bullet" -- a solution that a specific vendor gives them that says will solve all of their problems. The vendor knows that they are ignorant idiots, so they charge an arm and a leg for a solution that doesn't even work.
The government needs a foreign CIO or a very skilled eGovernment practitioner to create digital transformation within the government and within the country. The trouble is that ignorant idiot ministers don't know what they don't know and think that election has conferred wisdom on them.
The Bahamas will never be an ICT center because they don't know what they need to create one.
There have been public offers of ICT help for the government, and they have fallen on deaf ears.

Cayman Islands now approves 3 month work permits in three days without a medical.

You forgot to mention webshops along with junkanoo and church ... oh yeah ... and sweethearts.

LOL to everything. Jokes. Professionals on work permits een gern wanna be fingerprinted. Tell that to the libertarian tech boyz that they want to set up in Grand Bahama. That would be a deal-killer right there since Cayman doesn't fingerprint and they already have close to 100 tech startups.

The real enemy of Grand Bahama is the Port Authority. They were content to cut steaks off their racehorses (the licensees) while it fell in ruins around them. They had an ideal opportunity to make something out of Grand Bahama, and they just bled it dry.

The Hawksbill Treaty should be ripped up, the Port kicked out and Freeport should be nationalised.

The current management of the Port Authority is a bunch of corrupt do-nothings. Time for a change with the root cause of the problem.

Sunwing is Canadian ownership.

LOL! Pure farce. Pure comedy. Hilarious.
It's good to see Tommy using souvenir straw works as a cover for his portfolio.

>"It's not a question or opportunity to be the first movers, but there has not been a willingness from any major jurisdiction to embrace it unreservedly."

Gowon is wrong. The Cayman Islands have embraced it unreservedly and as a result, they are now the world's blockchain center, beating out Crypto Valley in Zug Switzerland. As a result, we are not even in the race to be an emergent technology or blockchain center. We can never catch up, and our financial services will die, being replaced by a Fintech digital economy that is vibrant in more progressive regimes. Once again we will be crumb-catchers from Cayman and Switerland's tables.

My understanding (which could be wrong -- I am working on sip-sip) is that most of the regulations are coming/came from a strawman posited by a small group under the aegis of the BFSB. The group drivers were a handful of lawyers from the various law firms, who collated the most stringent regulations from various global sources and put them together in a melange of sorts. If my information is correct, the restrictions/regulations would put a throttle on the process, with overt scrutiny, oversight and reporting procedures including limiting of business scope until full permission is given to operate unrestricted after a suitable time frame.

The reason that I know this, is that a colleague of mine from the bank that I used to be at in Nassau met one of the lawyers who participated in the group discussions and gave my colleague a thumb nail sketch of what was coming down the pipes.

Ironically, other than a few foreign wannabes with no real blockchain experience (just speaking gigs), most of the group with the exception of a local bank that has roots in Nassau but headquarters in Cayman has ever even touched crypto.

They are going around patting each other on the back, not knowing the blow that they have delivered to business end of blockchain/cryptocurrency technology business in The Bahamas.

And speaking of DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology), there is no reason why any of it should be regulated. The director of eGovernment for the Cayman Islands Government was quoted in the online Cayman Compass last week, that they didn't see a need for DLT regulation. As a matter of fact, they were embracing it for eGovernment solutions in authenticated identity management. They have a digital lab in conjunction with Cayman Finance where they are prototyping various solutions.