My Comments Nn The US Senate Banking Committee Hearing On Crypto

in cryptocurrency •  6 years ago  (edited)

It was an interesting debate. Roubini whose point of view has always been anti-crypto spoke highly of centralized private payment systems such as Alipay (China), M-Pesa (Kenya), Venmo and other mobile payment systems. His entire approach seemed to be underpinned by trust in authority, which I believe is unwarranted in much of the world. Van Valkenburg talked about risks involved in having a single point of failure multiple times bringing up the Equifax hack in the USA, for example. He also mentioned Alipay as a perfect tool for totalitarians as it is a simple database the government of China is able to completely control.

Roubini made some good points, too. He said multiple times that the blockchain is necessary only for buiding a trustless consensus mechanism. A private permissioned network does not need a blockchain to build a ledger as it would be wasteful. Roubini also mentioned the fact Chinese mining pools account for 70% of the Bitcoin hashrate. China being a totalitarian state, that makes, Bitcoin vulnerable to the Chinese state. That is actually concerning as it shows that Bitcoin is lacking decentralization.

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Bitcoin certainly has centralisation issues and not just from the hash-holder side:

Here's a blog post about the feud between BTC and BCH supporters and there the arguments of developer-driven centralisation comes up. The post is written from the point of a BCH adherent, but the frankly outlandish statements from Jimmy Song criticized in that post are quite real and continue to this day.

Still, blockchain tech and the dominance of Bitcoin are a reality that the US government will have to contend with, like it or not. US tarried with blockcahin adoption, much like they did with gene editing -- China beat them to the punch and took the lead. By denying adoption completely they would be isolating themselves and allowing China to expand its influence in these field even further. It will take them time, but I believe they'll be forced to adopt a more nuanced approach. This really isn't a matter of choice, in my opinion.

Was bitcoin created by the Chinese?

It is unknown who created Bitcoin. A pseudonymous developer called Satoshi Nakamoto wrote a whitepaper outlining the system and wrote code only communicating by email with other developers. Then he stopped communicating with anyone.

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