Opinion by: Zachary Kelman
No, the Genius Act did not remove all government control of money. It does not make it no tax on bitcoin. This is not a “legal” financial decentralized (DEFI). And not-this is not a Trojan horse for a mark-of-the-style CBDC, especially in the anti-CBDC provisions passed next to it.
What the Genius Act does – and what we have to make – it will ruin the strange that a number of powerful banks and regulators have kept over global dollars over the decades. It ends their monopoly on who gets access to clean dollars – and makes it a quiet mandate to monitor how that money is used, and if it aligns with political agendas in Washington or Wall Street, it’s harder – maybe even out of reach.
The Genius Act is the first true crack in a system that flies for many years toward financial authorityism. Riding a dollar wave driven by Stablecoin, it knocks the US financial course from a monitoring regime. It is in a hurry-not perfect, but significant-heading to greater financial freedom and global access to still-stable reserve money.
Although the torch-and-pitchfork most will receive less than a Crypto Panacea, understanding this landmark law requires looking for crypto history and banking rather than recent resentment on social media.
The crypto dream
When I left traditional finances for crypto over a decade ago, I had a “crypto dream” and a “crypto nightmare.” The dream is particularly Bitcoin, and the crypto is wider, will be a better form of money for people, especially those who have no access to it – a kind of public utility that promotes growing and improved life.
To make that happen, it is necessary to remain decentralized and not hurt. This means regulators keeping their grubby hands-and banks and institutions are prohibiting from its co-opting to maintain the status quo.
If the dream comes true, each person can exchange what they want, whatever they want, with the money that holds the real value – free from people who will reduce it, check it or decide how better they should use.
The crypto nightmare
The corollary, the Crypto NightmareThat Bitcoin and public blockchain will be repurposed to end money laundering – and in the process, end financial freedom. This is the vision of Blackrock CEO Larry Fink – then a Bitcoin critic, now Ibit’s face – outlined in 2017: “a real global digital currency” where “you understand everything, it all flows,” making making money impossible by design.
Related: The Genius Act passed and the DEPIN should be next
That may sound paranoid in some, but it’s not abstract. U.S. financial policy has evolved – from the Bank Secrecy law of 1973 to the USA Patriot Act – to a dazzling monitoring regime that deputed banks to monitor, record and police the behavior of their clients.
It hit a fever during the Obama, when the DOJ launched the Operation Chokepoint, forcing banks to break legal operations but political dissatisfied businesses – from payday lenders and pawn shops to porn sites and coin sellers.
Crypto lobbying
Since pirate wires Chronicled Crypto’s targeting under Chokepoint 2.0 intensely – or, as Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong placed, when “Warren and Gensler tried unlawfully killing our entire industry” – no need to recover how crypto fell under the crosshairs in the next chapter.
Fortunately, that chapter was shorter than expected. Crypto’s lobbying intensified. Judges have decided against SEC chair Gary Gensler, leading the approval of a Bitcoin ETF. And most of the cross, the USD-denominated stablecoins rose as the status of the global dollar reserves faced the most serious threats to modern history-and, for the first time, the American Financial Imperial Project blinks. Warren, Gensler and the institutionalists blinked. Cold heads prevail.
China and the BRICS bloc pushed for de-dollarization. However, Stablecoins disrupts their approach-forcing China and Russia to withdraw from crypto and focus on developing alternative state-supported to compete with the USDT and USDC. Treasury results from covid-era spending and debt debt, but crypto continues to grow, spreading dollars through stablecoins worldwide.
Then came the decisive turn: the response of penalties led by the US in the 2022 invasion of Russia in Ukraine. This is an emperor without a moment of clothing for US financial power – exposing the limits of the dollar weapon and weakening the case for the dollar that the monopoly cleaned by some US banks and their overseers.
Shifting against financial imperialism
Instead, the Genius Act struck a devastating blow against American financial imperialism-the transfer of power from correspondent banks to Stablecoins as tools to plug in the interest rate gap and slow de-dollarization. When Senator Elizabeth Warren, for example, pushed an amendment that needed all StableCoin providers to monitor Onchain transactions – a more intense version of what the Patriot Act of the Correspondent Banking Mafia – fellow democratic senator Kirstin Gillibrand, was clearly democratic, was clearly democratic. He clarified his priority not tracking – it strengthened the dollar.
This is probably not a moral awakening in favor of financial freedom, but the reality of imperial limitations and a tacit entry that penalties and chokepoints no longer carry the weight they have previously made. This is definitely not the fulfillment of the crypto dream, though it may mark the end of the crypto nightmare – unless the political air changes clearly, and Fink – who is now holding “keys” – changes the course with them.
So far, what we got is more accessible to the dollar -and more access to crypto.
At least, until the next election.
Opinion by: Zachary Kelman.
This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be done as legal or investment advice. The views, attitudes, and opinions expressed here are unique and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of the cointelegraph.
