Chris Moody at Yahoo! News reports on
Bitcoin “lobbyists” or advocates, or as his headline
(don’t always blame journalists for headlines) puts is, “the people
trying to make Bitcoin happen in Washington.”
Of course, any true Bitcoin mavens first reaction to that is
going to be: Bitcoin doesn’t have to happen in Washington.
It only has to happen on the blockchain and in individual
owners/users (hopefully secure and
possibly secret) wallets.
That is the important point about Bitcoin and should be
front and centered in any discussion about the politics that haunt
and hound the protocol and the cryptocurrency. Still, as I wrote
last May, while government can neither make Bitcoin happen nor stop
it from happening, it
can try to make life difficult and annoying for its users,
whether that comes in taxing
your profits or
arresting you for allegedly using Bitcoin to “launder
money”.
The piece discusses the Bitcoin Foundation and Jerry Brito, who
has written early and often for Reason on Bitcoin
issues—see his groundbreaking December
2013 feature on all the ways Bitcoin will likely change the
world beyond being an awesome currency.
It also limns a split in the ideological and practical world of
Bitcoin I’ve written about before. As I put it back in April:
between the crypto-anarchists from whom Bitcoin arose and who
were its first adopters, and the big-time legitimate businesses
stepping in to normalize the market, who would just as soon lose
the stink of weirdo anarchism surrounding Bitcoin that can scare
off big money.
Moody’s story talks of:
an independent San Diego, California-based entrepreneur
named Brett Stapper, the founder of Falcon Global Capital, [who is
late May] filed paperwork to lobby Congress on cryptocurrency
issues. In an interview with Yahoo News, Stapper said he’s in the
process of coordinating with a law firm — he won’t say which — to
organize lobby days and post a “practical guide” to Bitcoin
online.“We want to work with regulators. We want to work with
governments,” Stapper said. “We’re not libertarians who see this as
a thing that is possible on a massive scale without the help of
these organizations.”
All the people already using Bitcoin on scales small or massive
would choke at hearing this. Moody does a good idea getting across
exactly how weird and inexplicable Bitcoin likely seems to most old
congressfolk—though his lead does a good job pointing out as
recently as 40 years ago the way we now use credit cards might have
seemed equally far-out—and then hits the reader with a series of
questions that might seem very important in Washington but not at
all to most Bitcoin users:
For policy and regulatory purposes, Bitcoin’s transformative
technology blows open a hive of questions. Is it currency? Is it a
commodity? Is it property? Will it threaten the almighty dollar?
Which agency should regulate it? How should it be taxed? Should
vendors that trade bitcoins be treated like banks? Can I accept
bitcoins as campaign donations? Is it dangerous? Should we ban
it?
Well, it is what it is, to the first three questions. Probably,
none, ideally not at all but the community seems able to live with
it being taxed as property (as I reported
in April), no, yes, no, and no.
Moody closes with a useful summation of some ways the state is
recognizing or normalizing Bitcoin:
In May, the Federal Election Commission announced new
rules allowing candidates to accept Bitcoin donations. Since then,
Texas Republican Rep. Steve Stockman and Colorado Democratic Rep.
Jared Polis set up accounts to take donations on their websites.
Carl DeMaio, a Republican challenging Democratic incumbent Rep.
Scott Peters in California, has directed his campaign to establish
a Bitcoin page as well. The Libertarian Party (of course) was
the earliest political party to
accept such donations.A month before the FEC announcement, a company that specializes
in “Bitcoin
ATMs” set up one of its machines in a congressional office
building and Polis used it to buy $10 worth of bitcoins as a
curious Virginia Republican Rep. Bob Goodlatte, the chairman of the
House Judiciary Committee, looked on.
Moody also wraps up with some of the things that are at stake in
trying to stymie Bitcoin, in a way that any human of good will
should be able to grok:
Washington’s Bitcoiners go to great lengths to point to its
potential, especially for poor and oppressed people. Bitcoin, they
say, has vast potential to revolutionize the way we transfer money
and purchase goods and services. In impoverished, rural areas where
people lack access to banking institutions, Bitcoin users can send
and receive money wherever they can access the Internet on a
computer or a phone. (Bitcoiners use the term to describe these
people — “the unbanked” — with the same concern a Southern Baptist
might have referring to “the unchurched.”) For immigrants who need
to send money to families in their home countries, Bitcoin would
make it easy and relatively cheap.Bitcoin could also be useful to those living under oppressive
government regimes, advocates say, allowing them to support illegal
speech or causes without fear of censorship.
And of course it promises to be the Internet’s latest way to
make us all richer by wiping out middlemen who skim off of
transactions, the need for whom the technology obviates:
The growth of Bitcoin could, of course, undermine and disrupt
fee-charging money-transferring services such as MoneyGram and
Western Union; both are now considering adding a Bitcoin
option.“If I were a company like [that], I would be very afraid,”
[lobbyist Mary Beth] Stanton, who has advised the Bitcoin
Foundation, said.A worldwide embrace of the Bitcoin protocol could pose serious
risk to the remittance and banking industries, which has prompted
them to keep a close eye on its development. Last month, a federal
lobbyist filing disclosure for MasterCard listed “Bitcoin” as an
industry it would focus on.
Bitcoin’s famously up and down dollar prices seem to be above $650 again
on most exchanges today.
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