In a Thursday speech, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Paul S. Atkins announced “Project Crypto,” an initiative to modernize the country’s securities rules and regulations to move financial markets on-chain.

“Under my leadership, the SEC will not stand idly by and watch innovations develop overseas while our capital markets remain stagnant,” he said at an America First Policy Institute event in Washington D.C. His plan includes measures to reshore crypto businesses that have left the country and to ensure that “archaic rules and regulations do not smother innovation and entrepreneurship in America.”

      • iopq@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        2 days ago

        You mean the value that crashed like 30% over two years? At least bitcoin went back up

        • Lumisal@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          2 days ago

          It rebounding and crashing by hundreds in value like a meth head on caffeinated cocaine laced with LSD is what doesn’t make it a currency.

          No one wants a shit currency where one day a donut costs 1000 and the next 2000 and on the weekend it’s either 599 or 3999.

          That’s why it’s at best a speculative asset, except it’s dumber than that because it’s intangible. It’s like the long term stupidity of fiat mixed with insane instability, all while using way more resources.

          • iopq@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            2 days ago

            Same thing happened to the Argentine peso, let’s not pretend if you make a government currency it’s magically stable

            • Lumisal@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 day ago

              The Argentine peso crashed and then stayed down. That’s actually a sign of stability, because it’s remaining at a constant, not jumping up and down wildly.

              It didn’t crash only to go back to original value to the decrease by half and undulate like a wave, like Bitcoin and other crypto does.

              • iopq@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                2
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                1 day ago

                What are you talking about? It crashed, then crashed again, then crashed again. How is that stable?

                • Lumisal@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  1 day ago

                  You mean all crashes then? The 3 that have happened in over ONE HUNDRED YEARS?

                  You can’t be fucking serious to compare that fluctuation with Bitcoin’s

      • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        4
        ·
        edit-2
        2 days ago

        Honestly this is bullshit. In 1880s China they’d sometimes use thousand years old coins to pay for stuff. Coins of fucking non-standard weight and value! With symbols of sometimes dead writing systems (like Tangut). And still that was currency. EDIT: I mean, BTC is volatile, but not that bad.

        BTW, I once had an idea of a truly decentralized electronic currency without proof of work and all such, with plenty of emitters, signed transactions and coins of different emitters and parties or partitions having different value, determined via market mechanisms. Like automatic haggling on every transaction, a bit the way MMORPG markets have it, except, eh, they still have some fixed currency, and here it would all be relative.

        For all the inconveniences it would have two very good traits - no blockchain and no power effect (like the majority of the network deciding something or premined coins). But this isn’t important because GNU Taler people have made basically a similar, but far better, system than what I imagined, and theirs actually exists.

        • Lumisal@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          2 days ago

          1 Bitcoin used to be with less than a dollar.

          Now it’s thousands of dollars.

          It’s also lost thousands of dollars in value.

          It hasn’t even been 2 decades.

          There’s never been ANYTHING that volatile and unstable aside from maybe fucking tulips.

          • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            2 days ago

            Well, it should have went to some value from no value. So initial volatility was to be expected.

            While the current volatility - I don’t know, I guess it’s because a transaction is expensive and takes some time. If transactions would cost almost nothing and were almost instantaneous, I’d expect the volatility by now to not be very big. And if there were no premined coins, of course.

            And if there were inflation built into the system. BTC proponents boast how it having no such artificial mechanism is good.

            They, 1) don’t understand that having inflation stabilizes a currency, because there’s a stimulus to spend practically and not as part of speculation, 2) don’t understand that what they would want to imitate, gold, has inflation too.

            So - inflation and cheap and fast transactions are what would make BTC less volatile. It would be a less lucrative speculative asset.

            • Lumisal@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              2 days ago

              So - inflation and cheap and fast transactions are what would make BTC less volatile.

              Yeah, and we have that…

              It’s called fiat currency 🙄

                • Lumisal@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  2
                  arrow-down
                  1
                  ·
                  2 days ago

                  Yeah, because the last time humans tried decentralized money it also caused a ton of problems.

                  Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency isn’t inventing anything new, it’s just doing the same old localized bank notes system again, but with computers™

                  Even if crypto had any actual physical value, and solved the stability problems, lack of inflation, etc, it would still end up having control issues, because those already wealthy in a lot of it could manipulate the value easily by simply exchanging it or dumping it.

                  So basically you’d just end up with the problems of current currencies + all the problems crypto has, which were the same problems localized notes had 200 or so years as well.

                  • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    1
                    arrow-down
                    1
                    ·
                    2 days ago

                    Yes, I’ve remembered my old idea of something like an automated digital barter connected to storage space and computation provided on demand for tokens (every provider an issuer), or something else confirmed by escrow or whatever, after learning that in China 200 years ago people used non-uniform money, that is, all kinds of coins, some literally ancient still in circulation, and somehow that worked.

                    That wouldn’t be as convenient as uniform money as a universal equivalent, but wouldn’t have that particular kind of problem, which value manipulation via such globally meaningful action. Simply because there’d be no single variable to manipulate.

            • jj4211@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              2 days ago

              The reason for volatility is that any such concept at scale is subject to just the messiest lump of evolving opinions on everything. It will deflate, inflate, deflate wildly because it’s utterly subject to the whims of the people without any mechanism to counter a lack of mass consensus on what ‘value’ is.

              We started noticing as things scaled up, there needed to be some regulatory management to counter the whimsical populace. Hard to fight mass inflation or deflation when you can’t do anything to manage the “money supply” to offset panic.

              • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                2
                ·
                2 days ago

                Well, I’ve thought of a bit of an alternative, but that’d be more like digitally assisted barter with automated haggle and escrows, than like money.