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.”
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.
I’m talking about valuation pegged paper money, not hard value currency. This old strawman is getting old too.
The coins worked because they were still tangible material with assigned value (ie metals value by weight or marking).
The local bank paper money was different, and pegged to hard value materials (gold standard).
Cryptocurrency works like the second because, like the paper money, crypto doesn’t have inherent tangible value (technically even less than paper since it’s completely intangible).
It doesn’t work like the fucking Chinese coins (which, btw, still relied on a very centralized government existing anyway) because you can’t hold or do anything with 0s and 1s, nor can you physically keep it around.