We need to educate politicians to help them understand how important Bitcoin is for the future of the United States and the future of the world.
This is a transcribed excerpt of the “Bitcoin Magazine Podcast,” hosted by P and Q. In this episode, they are joined by the Bitcoin Policy Institute’s policy director, Jason Brett, to talk about what legislation is in the works and what not to do as a politician.
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Jason Brett: Well, I’d love to give you the overview of what’s happening in [Washington] D.C. Now, what I thought today is this is almost like a one on one. How does politics work and what not to do in a hearing, if you’re ever in Congress?
There will be some stuff about Bitcoin too, but I thought it would be entertaining to understand a little bit about (unfortunately) how things like go off the rails and our taxpayer dollars are just not at work. It’s actually good because it’s sort of comedy. I think art and comedy have a nice thing to do for society, but this is just like trainwreck central that we’re gonna listen to. Before we do that — speaking of train wrecks — they’ve been trying very hard to get a bill out on stablecoins and the truth is it takes a long time to get any legislation done in Congress, unless there’s something seriously wrong.
With the Terra/LUNA stablecoin, the algorithmic stablecoin that we all saw collapse, there’s a lot of pressure to regulate this market, but despite some negotiations from the U.S. Treasury, from Maxine Waters, who’s the Democrat chairwoman of the house financial services committee and Patrick McHenry, who is the Republican ranking member. Those are two sorts of leaders who were negotiating with people in the Treasury and it turns out that they couldn’t reach an agreement about stablecoins. There’s a lot of sticking points.
The bill has, whether banks can do it, or whether only non-bank can issue these types of things. So, without kind of going into the whole tether FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) concept that the pressure points right now for D.C. are this massive collapse in our cryptocurrency ecosystem with Terra, we’re still seeing the fallout with Celsius, Voyager, everything.
Even though there’s that kind of an element of maybe we should be protecting consumers. I think at this point there probably does need to be some minimum consumer protection for some of these instruments out there, besides Bitcoin. They weren’t able to get anything done and now it’s August.
August means everybody’s off, by the way. You are now in summer recess time. Congress doesn’t come back with any meaningful kind of work until maybe like Labor Day, but there will be work happening on the hill. The staffers will still be thinking about things, but everybody’s at home now.
