US draft bill seeks to ban big tech from taking over economy with private cryptocurrencies
Fearing the impact a popular privately-issued cryptocurrency might have on both the American and dollar-dominant global economy, US lawmakers are drafting a bill to prevent tech giants from taking over the financial sector.
© Reuters / Kim Hong-Ji
The bill titled ‘Keep Big Tech Out of Finance Act’ seeks to prohibit any tech company with annual global revenue of more than $25 billion from issuing their own cryptocurrency. The draft explicitly bans “large platform utilities from being a financial institution or being affiliated with a person that is a financial institution.” Any entity that violates the provisions of the bill could be subject to a daily fine of up to $1mn.
"A large platform utility may not establish, maintain, or operate a digital asset that is intended to be widely used as medium of exchange, unit of account, store of value, or any other similar function."
While the draft legislation does not name any particular companies or digital currencies, President Donald Trump singled out bitcoin and Facebook’s yet-to-be launched Libra in an attack on alternative payment systems last week. The president demanded harsher federal regulations for peer-to-peer financial transactions.
Facebook, which hopes to use its massive platform to launch Libra sometime next year, is facing an uphill battle with lawmakers and the Federal Reserve, which seem set on preventing the firm from becoming a dominant financial player.
This week, the social media giant will face a grilling from the Senate Banking and the House Financial Services Committees about the consequences of Libra’s launch, including privacy, money laundering, and consumer protection issues.
Guess more companies will be moving out of the U.S soon. :P
And lot ... :))
....and the person causing it as dead as Muammar Qaddafi.
Libra isn't a crypto by any definition of the word. It's merely a digital currency, a form of videogame gold, another version of Canadian Tire Dollars on a gift card. Cryptos are decentralized, Libra is not.
It's interesting to see how worried the traditional banking system is, over cryptos. They can finally see what's coming.
You say that like it really means anything. If the government(s) want cryptos to become mainstream they'll adopt it as such otherwise cryptos, as shown by this action, are only as good as the person(s) behind them wanting to do hard time or face the prospects of government(s) doing a Qaddafi on them.
Personally I find the idea of Mark Zuckerburg, a thief, becoming king of the world's financial structures repulsive.
It's just interesting to me, as somebody who has been following bitcoin and cryptos for years before most others had even heard of it, to see the mainstream finally doing something about (or pretending to do something about) cryptos. For years, they have pretended it didn't exist, and then for the past few years, they've been acknowledging them, but claiming they're not significant. Now they're saying they need to draft bills to protect the banking system. It's interesting to me as a monetary theorist, and it does mean something to those who follow these things.
Zuckerburg, the thief, as it stands right now is at the mercy of governments to allow him to implement a payment system on his platform that is in a non-traditional currency, if he succeeds it would be reverse, governments would be at the mercy of Zuckerburg's monetary system, how it is implemented, how it performs, stakeholders, rights, etc., with enough control he could be setting the demands of a new banking system. No one yet has had the capacity to be a viable threat to the current system, Zuckerburg with his "supposed" billions of followers (it would be interesting to know just how many of those people are dead as I know of two of them) In the US he hasn't been able to get much of a foot in the door that's why he's knocking on doors in Europe which is much more open to change, which is much more in trouble with their current banking system, which could see this as a viable opportunity to hedge a bet on success whereas FB followers would be using a foreign European exchange (fee profits) (products, services and jobs to support the system) to trade his currency for products offered in exchange for clicking on advertisements, earning currency and exchanging for products. In essence he could make and break entities, he controls who gets to advertise, he could control the vendors, shippers, etc., he could become his own version of Amazon if he so pleased. I am not saying his intent is to do that but when someone has the capacity heads start to turn.
This is all levels of stupid...but that second part worries me, "...or being affiliated with a person that is a financial institution." Other than that being a weird ass choice of wording...does that suggest that there are things in the bill to prevent major tech companies from working with companies that are in the crypto sphere?
I can't believe someone wasted their time on this shit... I guess it's possible that the people in office might be stupid enough to enact it...but you can't hold back change. Huge companies are using crypto and the blockchain because it is a useful technology. Are they going to stop? Doubt it. They'll probably just hire people to make sure if this does pass, it loses it's teeth...or even that they leave the US.
The intent isn't to hold back development of new technologies, the intent is to put into place measures to insure the integrity of the financial world markets. During testimony to the senate on the determination that cryptos do hold monetary value so people could move forward with lawsuits over losses the SEC chairman stated:
Through the years, technological innovations have improved our markets, including through increased competition, lower barriers to entry and decreased costs for market participants. Distributed ledger and other emerging technologies have the potential to further influence and improve the capital markets and the financial services industry. Businesses, especially smaller businesses without efficient access to traditional capital markets, can be aided by financial technology in raising capital to establish and finance their operations, thereby allowing them to be more competitive both domestically and globally. And these technological innovations can provide investors with new opportunities to offer support and capital to novel concepts and ideas.
History, both in the United States and abroad, has proven time and again that these opportunities flourish best when pursued in harmony with our federal securities laws. These laws reflect our tripartite mission to protect investors, maintain fair, orderly and efficient markets and facilitate capital formation. Being faithful to each part of our mission not in isolation, but collectively, has served us well. Said simply, we should embrace the pursuit of technological advancement, as well as new and innovative techniques for capital raising, but not at the expense of the principles undermining our well-founded and proven approach to protecting investors and markets.
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I have translated this article in Serbian, in my text about the incoming dollar-libra clash:
https://steemit.com/informationwar/@lighteye/korporativizam-kao-najvishi-stadijum-imperijalizma