Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy
concerned.tech
Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy
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Re: Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy
#2Mirrored from https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1534097850640093184:
Last week the global tech community engaged the democratic process to start a discussion with American lawmakers about responsible innovation and financial regulation concerning crypto-assets. The letter was covered widely by the global press, read by over 25,000 people and signed by over 1,400 new signatories.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/03/crypto-sk...
Signatories now include folks such James Gosling, Mat Velosso, Martin Fowler, Simon Willison, David SH Rosenthal, Dave Andersen, 25 computer science professors and engineers from Amazon, ACM, Adobe, AMD, Apple, Box, Block, CMU, Cornell, Disney, Dropbox, eBay, Google, GitHub, IEEE, IBM, Microsoft, MIT, Meta, Mozilla, Pixar, Shopify, Netflix, Oracle, Stanford, Shopify, Salesforce, Thoughtworks, VMWare.
Signatories are not only programming language creators, professors, and titans of industry but normal working software engineers who feel strongly about this issue and have the courage to speak up to help inform policy.
https://www.ft.com/content/f4b2fa1a-4057-4b10-9f3b-efa57e6bc...
The thesis is very simple: the status quo needs to change.
The most vulnerable in our communities are getting hurt because of regulatory inaction. And moving forward we need to proceed from a place of informed skepticism rather than reckless positivity.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgmyzk/the-pivot-to-web3-is-...
This is all at the same time that the crypto lobby is spending more money than the entire defense sector put together to influence senators and push their corporate interests on the public.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-02/crypto-in...
A grassroots coalition of scientists, think tanks, finreg experts, and legal scholars are organizing to assist the legislative process and ensure that fintech innovation serves financial inclusion and that investors, markets, and consumers are protected.
https://twitter.com/RealBankReform/status/153382048602256998...
The window to sign closes this Friday, and the letter is sent to Congress thereafter. Join the 1500+ other fellow programmers, scientists and engineers in the technology community in making your voice heard on this important issue.
Read the letter at https://concerned.tech
Re: Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy
#3"...and urge you to consider our objective and independent expert judgments to guide your legislative priorities, which we remain happy to discuss anytime."
So they have no real demands, just "listen to us about crypto, and not anyone else". I'm all for responsible regulation to protect people from scams, but this is ridiculous.
Signatories include every single mega tech corporation, which is an obvious development; they want to control this too.
Re: Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy
#4> We strongly disagree with the narrative — peddled by those with a financial stake in the crypto-asset industry — that these technologies represent a positive financial innovation...
This is a little bit unfair. When I became convinced that cryptocurrencies represented a positive financial innovation I immediately went out and bought some. Obviously the more potential someone sees the more they will be involved. This is a legitimate never-before-in-history situation. It was impossible to get an asset with the mix of properties crypto has before around 2010. This is an exciting era.
Re: Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy
#5> We strongly disagree with the narrative — peddled by those with a financial stake in the crypto-asset industry — that these technologies represent a positive financial innovation... This is a little bit unfair. When I became convinced that cryptocurrencies represented a positive financial innovation I immediately went out and bought some. Obviously the more potential someone sees the more they will be involved. Thi…
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Re: Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy
#6"...and urge you to consider our objective and independent expert judgments to guide your legislative priorities, which we remain happy to discuss anytime." So they have no real demands, just "listen to us about crypto, and not anyone else". I'm all for responsible regulation to protect people from scams, but this is ridiculous. Signatories include every single mega tech corporation, which is an obvious development;…
I mean, that seems like a reasonable demand? We all know that most politicians have a shaky understanding of technology at best, and corporate lobbyists fill that information void with a narrative that advantages their employers. This is a neutral (as in not on crypto payroll) group of technologists saying “hey, we understand this stuff at a technical and/or economic level, we’re willing to talk too”.
The signatures from FAANG companies are mostly rank and file engineers. I doubt their companies asked them to sign, but I think it’s representative of how widespread crypto skepticism is in tech.
Re: Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy
#7> We strongly disagree with the narrative — peddled by those with a financial stake in the crypto-asset industry — that these technologies represent a positive financial innovation... This is a little bit unfair. When I became convinced that cryptocurrencies represented a positive financial innovation I immediately went out and bought some. Obviously the more potential someone sees the more they will be involved. Thi…
> “Obviously the more potential someone sees the more they will be involved”
This sentence summarizes why crypto is so peculiar. It’s all about belief in some potential, not utility or returns. And you’re supposed to get “involved”.
When you buy a stock or a bond or a derivative or a currency hedge, it doesn’t usually become a way of life. But crypto isn’t a practical financial product so much as a club membership. Bored Apes figured this out and took out the financial pretense completely.
Re: Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy
#8Disappointing and misguided. It’s especially sad to see Bruce Schneier indirectly advocate for back doors.
Re: Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy
#9I can only predict that both the people signing this letter and the crypto maximalists are going to be very disappointed that this will somehow be the end of all cryptocurrencies or the full adoption and dismantling of the current system with one cryptocoin being a reserve currency. An example of such is where the critics were screaming over the so-called NY bill on 'banning' of PoW [0], but it turns out that not only it doesn't affected PoS cryptocurrencies, but only affected PoW with carbon methods and not via renewable methods.
As for the same letter [1] being pushed by critics like Grady Booch, ghuntley, Molly White etc al. who many here know in the industry, we would like to also know the ones who are left blank like 'Darren W. Seng' and 'Stephen Diehl' who are the most extreme and prominent names arguing against crypto. But it turns out that they seem to be connected as C-level executives and co-founders of a private blockchain startup named 'Adjoint' [2] that appears to be in direct competition with public blockchains like Bitcoin, and especially Ethereum.
Again it's very strange to see why that wasn't mentioned in the first place and why it's only specifically 'public blockchains' and not all blockchains both 'public' AND 'private'? This critic [3] seems to attack both of them and doesn't see any difference to them at all. Any idea why all of that including something called 'nanocoin' was deleted and scrubbed off of the internet?
Maybe cryptocurrencies like Ethereum (which has smart-contract capabilities) are the reason why the folks at Adjoint are eternally at odds with the crypto industry and are dedicated every single day to totally getting rid of all cryptocurrencies? I'm sure many have tried going down this path and Seng, and Diehl seem to have already deleted their repositories and associations [3] with the whole of Adjoint to pursuing this long utopian conquest and bringing others on board.
These crypto-assets for sure will be regulated, but once again the goal of getting rid of all of them is a similar path that has been trodden by the free-software activists, anti-IoT activists, privacy activists, anti-AI activists and anti surveillance-capitalism activists etc before them and it has resulted in co-existence rather than a complete and total removal or outright total ban on what they were against. Cryptocurrencies are no different and will co-exist rather than wither away. In this latest push, at least they learnt their lesson with this failed petition in the UK [4].
[0] https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2021/A7389
[2] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/adjoint-inc
[3] https://medium.com/@johny.codes/private-blockchains-even-wor...
Re: Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy
#10I can only predict that both the people signing this letter and the crypto maximalists are going to be very disappointed that this will somehow be the end of all cryptocurrencies or the full adoption and dismantling of the current system with one cryptocoin being a reserve currency. An example of such is where the critics were screaming over the so-called NY bill on 'banning' of PoW [0], but it turns out that not onl…
> it's very strange [...] why it's only specifically 'public blockchains' and not all blockchains both 'public' AND 'private'?
There is nothing objectionable with private blockchains (except maybe the hype). They are permissioned, and don't need PoW. As such they're just another data structure: an append-only distributed database that certain people can append to (like git).
It is neither wasting energy, nor a scam, nor an unregulated mechanism to move/launder money.