1/14 The rise of crypto has brought policy and regulatory issues to the forefront and are going to become massively important very quickly. The departing administration and the incoming Democratic forces are both eager to leave their mark.
2/14 The stakes are very high for society and the economy; the far-left wants to paint crypto as an anti-big tech and consumer protection issue, the far-right wants to paint crypto as a national security threat; the libertarians and moderates see the human economic potential.
3/14 Big banks want to limit it, tech entrepreneurs and silicon valley want to foster the innovation and disruption it heralds for the world.
4/14 Nearly all of these groups don’t have a full understanding of each other, and in that fact lies a huge risk of poorly considered policy and regulatory choices.
5/14 Biden promises to govern from the middle, focus on rebuilding infrastructure, strengthening America’s role in the world.
6/14 In the next 4 years, it’s THE time for decisive action on embracing public blockchains and crypto as the future of our economy.
7/14 The analogies to 1996 are significant -- many in congress and existing regulators thought one should get an FCC license to have a website.
8/14 hawks sought to ban free use encryption tech (crypto) as a military tech. Open access to a global network was met with hysterics.
9/14 Back then, monopoly media, communications and tech firms (ATT, TimeWarner, Microsoft) opposed the open internet, seeking to protect and build on their centralized platforms.
10/14 The advocates of an open internet, open access and free and fair competition, even with massive uncertainty of the scale and use-cases, led to breakthrough legislation - The Telecommunications Act of 1996.
11/14 Net Neutrality was born, open protocols, open source software, and the decentralized internet was allowed to grow and flourish in America and globally.
12/14 The big monopoly players saw their business models disrupted, and we saw 100x improvements in so many dimensions of how the world works.
13/14 Those of us who joined crypto because we believe that it could do for the economic system what the early internet did for information and communications need to be ready, because the shit is about to get real.
14/14 There’s a real chance to work with the left-middle and right-middle to forge a path, and make open access and use crypto and blockchain a core part of America’s growth strategy for the next decade.
You can follow @jerallaire.
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