Congress Needs To Provide Guardrails for the Cryptocurrency Revolution

By Josh Hammer, Opinion Editor. October 21, 2021. (Newsweek).

The Chinese Communist Party poses the most comprehensive 21st-century threat to the American nation, the American people and the American way of life. The first half of this century will be defined by how the U.S. meets the Chinese challenge across the full spectrum of economic, national security, geopolitical and cultural issues. And an easily neglected aspect of our new great-power competition with our Far East arch-foe now cries out for diligent and prompt attention: safeguarding the fruits of the nascent, but ascendant, cryptocurrency revolution.

Last month, China effectively banned all cryptocurrency trading and mining, which the Communist Party increasingly views as a threat to its planned “digital yuan” sovereign digital currency, which may be released as early as 2022. The People’s Bank of China, the Chinese central bank and Federal Reserve equivalent, barred international exchanges from providing cryptocurrency services to Chinese investors and speculators. It also banned financial institutions and digital exchanges from facilitating domestic crypto transactions.

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Still-young crypto industry could grow stronger — if SEC allows it to thrive

By Charles Gasparino. September 19, 2021. (New York Post).

The noise surrounding the $2.2 trillion crypto industry often drowns out the reality that we are on the verge of something revolutionary. If things go right, crypto and the blockchain technology could usher in the next Internet revolution. 

Things are now going terribly wrong. The US stands the very real chance of killing this business here by driving digital innovation overseas and ceding advancements to other countries including Communist China.

Why? Because our regulators, mainly those at the Securities and Exchange Commission, are either too feckless or too turf-hungry (or a combination of both) to understand the dangers of their asinine approach to overseeing a nascent and important technology.

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With Crypto, Congress, Not Agencies, Should Decide What’s Next

By Andrew Langer. April 27, 2021. (The American Spectator).

Alongside the public’s newly found fascination with cryptocurrencies (which only sometimes includes their attempts to try and understand what they are — a process for the teacher akin to trying to explain to an AARP member how to program a VCR back in the day), there is serious debate and discussion among scholars and policymakers about how to look at them and treat them for public policy purposes.

From a public policy perspective, the question centers essentially on assigning “crypto” to one of four different categories. Are they

  • Securities? Are they a tradeable “financial instrument” that create some kind of ownership right?
  • Commodities? Are they some kind of raw material gained through a resource-intensive extraction process?
  • Currencies? Are they some kind of unit of exchange backed by some kind of hard asset?
  • Something different entirely, requiring a whole new vocabulary or public policy approach?

All are being considered, and each approach has its adherents and detractors.

The most logical route would be to view cryptocurrency as an entirely new thing (which it is). It doesn’t easily fit into any of the preexisting categories — it’s somewhere, honestly, between a commodity and a currency. Many cryptocurrencies do require intense resource utilization, but they can immediately be used as a standard of exchange.

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Bidenworld On Crypto: Don’t Fall Into The Regulation Trap

By Jared Whitley – March 5, 2021. (Seeking Alpha)

Bitcoin’s market value recently topped $1 trillion. Tesla recently bought $1.5 billion in the digital asset to set up liquidity for accepting it as a form of payment for its cars. Microstrategy, which is publicly listed like Tesla, issued convertible bonds to help amass $4 billion in bitcoin on its balance sheets. China has rolled out a digital yuan – the eCNY– now being used in retail transactions in major Chinese cities.

Digital money is here. America had better accept reality and embrace this new innovation. If we do, the U.S. has all it takes to dominate the new frontier of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology and lead the fintech revolution. But if the Biden Administration’s America-last policy chooses overregulation instead of innovation, the U.S. will hand the 21st Century economy to the Chinese Communist Party.

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