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Consumer Protection Would Eliminate an Essential Function of Bitcoin | | | According to its white paper, bitcoin was meant to overcome the “inherent weaknesses of the trust based model” that is being relied on for transactions over the net. Satoshi Nakamoto presented a few specific benefits, but it was always clear that privacy was probably primary. But while Americans today often raise privacy concerns in their day-to-day lives, most do little to protect our privacy, usually entrusting much of their personal and confidential information to intermediaries. Of course, for most of the relationships formed by such entrustments, there is no legally recognized privilege. Still, for either convenience or insurance, Americans entrust our information to intermediaries anyway. In the case of bitcoin, its technology, which purposefully encrypts the identity of its holders, will not be able to overcome threats to anonymity as Americans continue to allow our concerns for convenience and insurance to predominate. | |
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Why don't you link to the document you are relying on?
| | | Without anonymity, Bitcoin cannot facilitate "completely non-reversible transactions" as its founder envisioned | | | At this point, cryptocurrency users have not been vocal about concerns over the lack of insurance when it comes to their virtual coins, which literally disappear when misplaced. But if such concerns are there but just not yet voiced, then the federal government has stepped in to provide a platform. The executive order passed by President Biden did little to change federal policy, but just announced what was already underway, in addition to, most notably, describing the executive branch’s view as it addresses the technology. Essentially, the order admitted the promising nature of the technologies, but raised concerns over consumer protection. This will likely lead to regulations aimed to protect retail cryptocurrency traders, but would also require disclosures that will reduce anonymity. Furthermore, it might influence the rise of cryptocurrency depository services being opened up to retail traders, which would largely eliminate anonymity. | |
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I'm not sure that I understand the purpose of this draft. Bitcoin is not a currency: it's a collectible, "Satoshi Nakamoto" is a character created by a man, a figure in a science-fiction art project. You don't know who lies behind the pseudonym, but I do, and I'm not sure why you think the opinions of the character are those of his inventor, which I'm pretty sure they're not.
As you point out, there never was any actual "anonymity" to public-ledger blockchains used as "money," because whether the ledger records identity is only one method of tracking events in the market.
Cryptocurrency hype, like Y2K, is the consequence of living in a society dominated by technology that even educated people, like lawyers, completely do not understand. So we can be sure, as you say, that neither citizens nor legislators have any grasp of what is going on behind the noise..
But in that context, we need more clarity about the essay's central purpose. If your goal is to explain that we need anonymous digital payment systems, why bother with Bitcoin? David Chaum showed how to do that in 1982. Untraceable digital cash is once again the subject of proposed federal legislation. If the essay's main point is the one suggested in the present draft's conclusion, that citizens are uninformed about the real issues involved in the long-term shift in the nature of money that began in 1971, superbly described by the late David Graeber in Debt: The First 5000 Years (2014), then once again Bitcoin is a distraction, or at best an ironic illustration.
So I think this first draft has served well its most basic function, to unearth issues. The route to improvement, in my view, is to determine which of those issues is central, to get in touch with the sources that help you to teach your readers about that central issue, and to bring the discussion out of crypto bro hype and into sharper focus.
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