With its recent legal threat against Coinbase’s new interest-bearing cryptocurrency accounts program, the Securities and Exchange Commission has caused a stir in both finance and technology – two worlds that have always been intertwined but are even now facing due to the impact of digital technology are each other in a deepening rivalry. Industry observers now expect the Biden government to commit administrative offenses against cryptocurrencies.
What’s at stake is far more serious than mainstreaming cryptocurrency. Facilitated by technology, the expansion of financial firms into our personal lives threatens to push Americans into a de facto social credit system that punishes them for making decisions – and even expressing opinions – that the people at the controls don’t like.
Consumer finance is being irreversibly embedded in digital technology at breakneck speed. A new McKinsey poll shows that over three-quarters of Americans use some type of digital payment platform. According to Statista, around two thirds of Americans should be using digital banking by next year. Increasingly, people participate in the economy for the pleasure of the operators of their infrastructure, which gives those responsible for this infrastructure enormous power to shape and punish behavior. You take advantage of.
In the past few months, payment processors, web hosts, and other companies have shamelessly taken coordinated action in step with government priorities to financially lock out disadvantaged online businesses. The elimination of an incumbent president from social media, regardless of merit or reason, opened the door to a regime where those who can terminate and suspend accounts do so at will and in unison. That logic has led directly from one payment platform, Stripe, siphoned Donald Trump to a much larger one, PayPal, which has blacklisted customers in an effort to clean up their user base.
Feeding the beast makes them stronger: the more power these organizations wield, the more arbitrary and punitive their ethical or ideological standards become. As PayPal’s founding COO David Sacks has warned, orchestrating the interlocking federal, financial, and technological power to punish its critics and alleged opponents bypasses our basic constitutional protection: a person who controls their financial and social Media accounts closed after being closed by. identified as subversive, the government has no legal recourse.
Thanks to its vast resources, which include Silicon Valley and the federal government, the regime has extensive knowledge of your online activities. Think, say and do what it wants and you are allowed to function. Deviate and you will be closed. That is the un-American logic of the social credit system that is being forced upon us.
Without a radically new and better way to generate, circulate, store, and exchange wealth, Americans will be increasingly powerless to prevent their financial system from being used to turn their country into a technological cage.
Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies can free ordinary Americans from the financial and psychological discipline and punishment at the core of this control system. But that gift will go away when policymakers and lawmakers, starting at the state level, place regulatory and legal barriers to the combined efforts of Washington, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley to make cryptocurrency another cog in the system they control , not firmly established.
States need to become broad legal havens for cryptocurrencies. The use of digital technology to rebuild America as a soft social credit system can only be stopped by putting digital power in the hands of the people. For generations, our military and intelligence agencies have gradually organized America’s technological advancement around unaccountable and extra-legal social control. Our dependence on this system for future innovation imposes an intolerable price on our freedom and our prosperity.
Antitrust measures against gigantic companies like Google and Amazon are wise and fair, but do not give ordinary citizens a digital agency back and anchor them in law. The rapidly evolving social credit system is breaking the line between private and public; The Americans need Bitcoin and Co. to regain their fate in the digital world instead of entrusting it to private or public overlords.
The critics had a great day with cryptocurrency, and in the worst case scenario, it deserves the cartoons. But that’s because, like all tools, it can be turned against its best use. For the architects of the social credit system, it is important that the amount of new crypto mining is severely limited, that crypto transactions are strictly monitored and limited, and that all forms of crypto be integrated into the only regulatory and investment environment that Washington, Wall . controlled road and Silicon Valley.
Americans need just the opposite: the right to make and buy computers powerful enough to mine Bitcoin and build data centers; the right to use and move cryptocurrencies free of invasive surveillance, reporting requirements and arbitrary restrictions; and the right to freely use cryptocurrencies among themselves as real digital currencies. Federal law in this sense would be ideal, but in the current hostile environment the most pressing starting point is at the state level.
Without these laws, Americans will lack the digital power necessary to escape the coming social credit system. There’s no Plan B if lawmakers can’t protect Americans’ digital rights.
James Poulos (@jamespoulos) is Editor-in-Chief of The American Mind and a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Digital Life. He is the author of The Art of Being Free and the upcoming Human, Forever: The Digital Politics of Spiritual War.
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source https://www.bisayanews.com/2021/09/16/opinion-how-bitcoin-can-immunize-america-from-cancel-culture/
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