The cryptocurrency industry has arrived. There is no way to hide from this. Over the last few days, the cryptocurrency industry help up a half a trillion dollar spending bill. Nothing in the main section of the bill was being contested.
In this video I discuss how the number of people who are involved in crypto doubled in the first half of the year. With 30-40 million of them in the US, this is a block the Senators had to listen to.
The question is where will we be come November 2022, when elections are held again? There could be more than 100 million Americans involved. Could crypto be close to becoming a puppet master?
▶️ 3Speak
It will take time for the establishment to reach their goals if they succeed. However, what the end goals are is clear: destroy the censorship resistance and pseudonymity of cryptocurrencies. They will attempt to achieve the former by a bill like this that will make it a crime not to collect KYC information about addresses involved in transactions included in blocks signed by a miner or a block validator. What miners/etc. in the US will have to do is only include transactions involving addresses on a whitelist only including fully KYC'd addresses. That will make mining/staking/validating blocks economically unfeasible in the US. This won't be enough to destroy the censorship resistance in the whole world but it will cause miners to migrate. There are two potential next steps: 1) the US will use its massive influence through international organizations to go after those parties elsewhere in the world 2) coins that have had to do with non-whitelisted addresses will not be welcome on exchanges under US jurisdictions.
If the powers that be are successful at coercing cryptocurrency holders to reveal their identities by whitelisting their funds or risk losing access to their funds, that will practically be the end of the pseudonymity of cryptocurrency.
Now, this won't necessarily entirely destroy the value proposition of crypto assets. Institutions who adopt them take KYC/AML and other registration obligations for granted because they're already regulated to a high degree. In fact, the full integration of crypto assets with the established financial space may well attract more than enough capital to offset investment motivated by more idealistic goals.
The problem is which projects will be able to survive the transition and which will not. I'm guessing Hive might end up creating a compliant fork where claiming funds is conditional upon providing full KYC details. That chain would be the one preferred by all the centralized exchanges while the non-compliant one would be left fully in the decentralized space. Selling coins on the latter chain might prove challenging as they would be considered "high risk".
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I'm happy the crypto community came together and expressed themselves. Every day these laws pass in other areas and no one knows anything about them. Perhaps this is a wake up call to government that the crypto industry gives a crap and will voice their opinion. Might make them second guess next time they try and sneak something in.
I think its very well possible for the crypto community to create its own lobbying group. Though I don't think it will really help the average person since it will be the whales pushing opinions.
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Bernie just voted this amendment down.
The bill is passing and going to the House with the Original Language.
This is not good as leaves things open to interpretation.
However it still has to go through the house where things could change.
Also would not take effect until 2023.
Plenty of time.
I don't want to say the industry is too big to fall as that is just jinxing it but it really does feel like there is too many people involved and too much built that we are in a solid place.
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