US Banking Committee Chair: Bitcoin Ban Won’t Work, Cryptocurrency “Is a Global Innovation”
The U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs recently held a hearing on cryptocurrency and blockchain technology regulation where they realized the extreme difficulties in actually implementing an effective cryptocurrency ban.
The Banking Committee Chairman, Mike Crapo (R-ID), said that “if the United States were to decide we don’t want cryptocurrency to happen in the United States and tried to ban it, I’m pretty confident we couldn’t succeed in doing that because this is a global innovation”. He was eluding to the technical difficulties in banning a decentralized network that anyone is free to use and access through an internet connection. Jeremy Allaire, co-founder and CEO of global financial services company Circle, testified in response, reiterating the Senator’s intuition about a cryptocurrency ban.
“I think the challenge that we all face with this is some of these cryptocurrencies — they’re literally just a piece of open-source software. There’s nothing else. It exists on the internet, it’s open-source software, anyone can implement it, it runs wherever the internet runs, and these have a monetary policy where these assets are algorithmically generated … That is a challenge that every government in the world now faces — that money, digital money, will move frictionlessly everywhere in the world at the speed of the internet.”
This comes amid increasing cryptocurrency news among government officials with some calling for bans, some calling for hearings, and others calling for cryptocurrency to simply be left alone.
Decentralized cryptocurrency needs decentralized spending options
The fact that cryptocurrency is decentralized is what negates any attempt at a ban since any individuals with internet access and a decent computer would be able to access cryptocurrency code, run a node, and send money back and forth to other individuals.
Not Bitcoin alone, because Bitcoiners still need credit cards for everyday purchases.
— Joel Valenzuela (@TheDesertLynx) July 31, 2019
The decentralized nature of cryptocurrency must go hand-in-hand with allowing to individuals to make payments without any governmental or centralized authority inhibiting them in order to be truly free of third-party chokepoints. Bitcoin has been struggling in this attribute since its relatively high and volatile fee structure periodically make small payments uneconomical. This resulted in two famous Bitcoin personalities, Jimmy Song and Greg Maxwell, advocating for the use of credit cards instead of Bitcoin to actually make purchases. Instead, Dash has developed numerous innovations such as instantly confirmed an respendable payments, ChainLocks, and overall efficiency improvements to make sure Dash can offer consumers affordable transactions, even at scale, which maintained low transaction costs up to the three million transactions during the 24 hour stress test.
Growing peer-to-peer digital cash usage beyond the ability to easily censor
While decentralized and difficult to control, the cryptocurrency industry is still in its infancy and can suffer slowed growth from the application of severe regulatory restrictions. Wide adopted as a payments system, however, makes enforcing any oppressive regulation much more difficult, giving projects a direct incentive to push mass adoption.
Dash has not only been achieving direct integrations into end-user merchants, especially in Latin America, like grocery stores, department stores, restaurants, and much more, but has also been able to get integrated in to numerous POS and ATM services. These integrations with POS and ATM companies have helped Dash service many more merchants, as well as become an even more usable tool for those needing to send remittances to loved ones, but also needing to save more money and get the money to its destination faster than traditional remittance services. Then consumers can also buy copious amounts of gift cards with Dash and even receive Dash-Back on some of them, which greatly expands the purchasing spectrum.
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