by Dan Burns

Aug 1, 2022, 7:30 AM

Let cryptocurrency die. Or make it die.

You’d think any rational person would have been at least somewhat skeptical from the start, at the idea of our Supreme Tech Overlords making up a new kind of money. You’d think. Certainly it’s fallen on entirely deserved hard times of late, and it makes no sense that efforts are being made to rescue it.

First, in the administration:

Now, just as the whole sector is collapsing of its own weight, here come the Treasury and the Fed to rescue it, perhaps bringing along the House Financial Services Committee with them. The Treasury, and to some extent the Fed, are both played by Nellie Liang, who is undersecretary of the Treasury for domestic finance.

Liang spent most of her career at the Fed. She is an enthusiast of financial “innovation” and relatively gentle regulation, as well as a master of turf consciousness. She has had substantial influence on Janet Yellen, formerly at the Fed, now Treasury secretary.
(The American Prospect)

And in Congress:

Speaking in a pre-recorded interview released during Bloomberg’s Crypto Summit on (July 19), one of the bill’s sponsors, Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) said cryptocurrency is still puzzling for many of her colleagues.

“I think both Kirsten and I believe that the bill, in one piece, as a total bill is more likely to be deferred until next year,” said Lummis, referring to her cosponsor, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.). “It’s a big topic; it’s comprehensive; and it’s still new to many U.S. senators. It’s a lot for them to digest, with the few remaining weeks we have in this calendar year, to digest such an enormous topic.”
(Fortune)

(As far as people not getting behind this because they supposedly just don’t know enough about it, as G. B. Shaw once noted in a different context, you don’t have to eat the whole apple to know it’s rotten.)

Modern economies are complex systems, and even if crypto looked like a good deal in some ways (which it doesn’t), throwing it into the mix big-time, with or without meaningful and enforceable efforts at regulation (currently there aren’t any, really), is bound to produce problematic, even disastrous, unanticipated consequences. Right now it’s just another toy for the ultra-entitled, but the intent is to foist it, or more precisely the consequences of it, on all of us. While I’m not suggesting that China’s dictators generally make smart, enlightened calls about things, that country’s cypto ban seems about right to me.

Remember how Big Tech social media sites like Facebook were going to bring about world peace and harmony and understanding? The U.S. subsequently put the worst kind of despicable bigot, namely Trump, into the White House. People buy the tech hype and will not learn.