Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy

Bitcoin some chat system where anyone can see all the messages but not necessarily who sent them

Regular banking private chatting but the government, those in chats, and the chat service provider can get detailed access to logs. A bit like email but with more government access.

Privacy coins a bit like E2E but maybe chat participants don’t know whom they are chatting to. (I’m not super sure on the details).

So I think the first half of your analogy is pretty broken and there are middle grounds (eg government being able to subpoena chat records from companies) in the chat space.

The second issue is that I don’t really buy the analogy between private speech and money. Some people have many orders of magnitude more money than others but that isn’t really the case with private speech (obviously some people may have much more reach when speaking publicly, but this doesn’t go through E2E encryption; attempting to maintain large conspiracies is a social challenge rather than a technical challenge of overcoming group size limits on your favourite messenger). So in some sense the benefits of private chat are reasonably fairly shared across people whereas the benefits of private money disproportionately go to the people with much more money.

"Confiscate money from all people in Casino" / "Confiscate all Bitcoin" are, I believe, extremes.both

"Issue licenses for gambling, provide oversight, age restrict, run information campaigns about dangers of gambling, create support and help programs", is, I think, reasonable (and we can further discuss details, and we do; "Are loot boxes gambling"; "should state / group X run casinos"; who and how should be able to gamble, what is the right amount if disclosure, what is an informed responsible consenting adult, etc. All good things for us as society to honestly discuss).

"Ensure bitcoin income is taxed (like every other investment), that it follows disclosure rules (like every other investment), that it is open and transparent and licensed, etc cetera", is I think reasonable and merely catches up the playing field and closes off loopholes that EVERYbody knew were temporary loopholes (and smarter people than me can discuss details). "Government should not spend gazillion dollars blindly investing into this technology hoping to find problem to solve" is also, I think, a statement I'd stand behind. And not unique - there are MILLION fads or technologies or endevours I don't want government to invest in, so don't feel picked on :)

IF that latter option still somehow causes everybody involved to lose money... well ain't that just food for thought though, right? It means people were literally banking/hoping/assuming they can do things without oversight and through magical loopholes forever. I don't want to say "illegally" because there may or may not have been a law in time with new technology. But crypto and bitcoin are almost as much fun to discuss as religion with a Christian apologetic - it gets all shifty very quickly; it is and isn't investment, or a transactional system, or currency, or stable, or volatile, or private or public,or efficient, or safe, reversible or fixed, etc etc depending on needs of the moment and which point we're trying to make.

I don't see anything synonymous with "Confiscate" in that letter. I see it as a small attempt to counterpoint the massive over-enthusiasm, bluster, lobbying, and tall tales that abound around crypto (there may or may not be a nugget of useful technology, use case, future approaches in blockchain; willing to discuss that; but anybody that rejects the observable amount of scam and dishonesty in today's actual crypto implementations, investments, sales pitches and pushes and frankly disinformation campaigns, is not having an honest conversation with me and/or is trying to sell me something and/or has been sold/swindled themselves).

My 100 Croatian Lipa :)

I don't think politics work like you think they do. If the opposition could just "fork the law" when they don't like what the government is doing, there'd be millions of sovereign countries by now.

The chain’s use is to provide a secure layer for signed messages. It might be a dissident writing a message that cannot be revoked by their government; it might be a transfer of value from user A to B that is not reliant on a central clearing house to allow it; it may be a state change that represents the transfer of ownership of a digital asset like a ENS domain name alias; it might be a more complex application like USDC that enables a stable dollar-like currency to compose with the rest of the blockchain ecosystem. These are some use cases already occurring; there are other ways to achieve similar (like using PayPal instead of USDC) but all have different considerations and costs/benefits.

I don’t agree with your other point. Whether somebody spends $1 or $1000 on an abortion in the US, they deserve the same degree of privacy, or at least the option to achieve privacy. Replace this scenario with any other that might like to take advantage of E2EE, like a dissident or political activist.