The Risk of Enforcing the Status Quo

This is so disappointing.

A key framing problem with the proposed legislation is that it presents criminal misuse of blockchain technology in a vacuum. It then attempts to address the challenge by shoving the genie back in the bottle. Both the problem framing and the proposed solution are irresponsible.

First, there are other and more demonstrably harmful abuses of blockchain technology - most notably, China's CBDC, which today enables an unprecedented level of invasive financial surveillance and centralized civil control.

Responsible legislation should weigh costs and benefits across the full spectrum of civic considerations. This bill does not. To the contrary, by making basically all participants in public blockchain networks subject to onerous monitoring and reporting, it is a tacit approval of the kinds of dystopian controls already embraced by authoritarian states - precisely the kinds of controls democratic societies ought to be aggressively resisting.

This is a pity. While the CCP consistently implements policies aligned with its authoritarian values, if US senators like Warren aren't interested in liberty-preserving applications of new technologies, who is?

The genie won't go back in the bottle. Public permissionless blockchains are here, and China's centralized surveillance CBDC is here. It is not a question of "if" but of "what kind" of blockchain systems our children and grandchildren will interact with everyday.

The choices we make now will greatly impact which future we enter. For that reason, I believe we should be focused on implementions and policies that, together, enhance liberties while protecting citizens - both from crime AND from authoritarian overreach.

But this can't happen until we replace the adversarial climate fostered by Senator Warren with something more responsible: a collaborative climate focused on building the next generation of strong democratic systems, systems that integrate powerful new technologies (like public blockchains) to ensure alternative authoritarian implementations (like China's CBDC) are uncompetitive and fail.