“I think there’s no capacity to kill Bitcoin, even the Chinese with their firewall and their extreme intervention on their society cannot kill Bitcoin.”
I couldn’t believe I had just heard a government official say that. Finally, somebody in government was stating what the early adopters of crypto already believed all along.
Now, if only all the heads of state around the world could just hear and understand what Representative Patrick McHenry had just stated so matter-of-factually: maybe then they would realize how much time they were wasting trying to ban and squelch the fire of the "crypto-revolution"…
… maybe.
My home state of Texas, for example, has for the past eighteen months been trying to tamp down on illicit crypto-currency activity happening within it by sending out cease-and-desist letters to a plethora of shady crypto enterprises like Bitconnect, DavorCoin and R2B Coin.
I think they finally realized that a cease-and-desist letter from a single state doesn’t really stop anybody from doing anything. A bill in the Texas House that would ban privacy coin use in the state has been dead in the water since 2018. (How would they feasibly ban privacy coins anyway?) Texas regulators, for the most part, have given up on trying to tame this new financial frontier. Other states still seem to be trying to make people listen them.
Crypto-currency, in particular Bitcoin, has been a global phenomena for a little more than a decade and cannot be shutdown by a single state bound by geography, even if that state is a powerful nation-state like the US or China. Besides it's global reach, Bitcoin also has massive amounts of capital, technology and very intelligent people backing it. It is the same with other high market cap coins. So, why are governments around the world, just in these past two years, starting to try to regulate, ban and tax crypto?
They see a new source of revenue…
… they see something that "needs" new laws to make it a safe for the “dumb” investors…
… they see a new way to expand their control.
Whenever some new technology comes along, governments usually become the default determiners of how it will develop based on what kinds of laws they pass to tax and regulate it. This has been true of most technologies developed since the 1960s and even to some extent this is why the internet is the way it is today. Most of us today use technologies that have already been thoroughly sanctioned and "vetted" by the government bureaucracy first.
However, Bitcoin is different. Bitcoin is the first technology that does not have a physical origin of development that can be pointed to as it single source. It exists above us in the “cloud” and in the “ledger” and in that way it is similar to gold. Gold is rare and exists in the dirt and is “decentralized” a.k.a it is scattered all over the earth. If you are in good place to mine gold and know how to do it, you can add to your wealth without the government even knowing it. It is the same with Bitcoin.
The sooner the governments of the world realize that they cannot control it, the sooner they too can benefit from the next technological revolution that is decentralization and crypto-currencies. Places like Malta and South Korea are already reaping the benefits of having crypto based solutions integrated directly into their city infrastructures. Only time will tell though, which one of the three major super powers will start to really embrace it ahead of the other two.
If and when that happens, all bets will be off and each nation will engage in the next “moon race” to be the best at the technology. At that point, we might even start to hear an old, familiar phrase being thrown around on the news networks as a "serious" talking point parroted by financial talking heads around the world and that phrase would be...
"When moon?!"
Ready for the lift-off,
Coffee w/ Crypto