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“You’d have to shut down the Internet” to ban Bitcoin, says SEC’s Hester Peirce
Cryptoslate.com ^ | APRIL 10, 2021 AT 2:27 PM | Liam Frost

Posted on 04/10/2021 8:35:52 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum

Any of the government’s efforts to ban Bitcoin would be “foolish,” said Hester Peirce (aka “Crypto Mom”), a very Bitcoin-friendly commissioner at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), during a MarketWatch virtual conference earlier this week.

“I think we were past that point very early on because you’d have to shut down the Internet,” Peirce said, adding, “I don’t see how you could ban it. You could certainly make the effort. It would be very hard to stop people from [trading Bitcoin]. So I think it would be a foolish thing for the government to try to do that.”

The statement came on the heels of Ray Dalio, a billionaire investor and founder of Bridgewater Associates, arguing that there’s “a good probability” that governments around the world would ban Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

“Every country treasures its monopoly on controlling the supply and demand. They don’t want other monies to be operating or competing, because things can get out of control. They outlawed gold, that’s why also outlawing Bitcoin is a good probability.”

However, according to Peirce, the main issue for authorities—at least when it comes to cryptocurrencies—is to find an approach to regulation that would be productive and non-restrictive at the same time. She noted:

“We’ve seen other countries take, I would say, a more productive approach. We really need to turn that around. And I’m optimistic, with a new chairman coming in with a deep knowledge of these markets, that is something we could do together—build a good regulatory framework.”

At the same time, Peirce also pointed out that she doesn’t know when—or if—a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) will finally be approved in the U.S. Recently, we’ve seen a new wave of major investment companies, such as Fidelity Investments, SkyBridge Capital, and VanEck, filing their applications for Bitcoin ETFs with the SEC.

The regulator, however, never approved a single filing of this kind so far.


TOPICS: News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: bitcoin; blockchain; btc; cryptocurrency; elonmusk; hesterpeirce; raydalio; sec; tesla
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To: proust

Here.


21 posted on 04/10/2021 9:19:24 PM PDT by aMorePerfectUnion (I'd rather be anecdotally alive than scientifically dead...)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

I can survive without Amazon - that’s what’s important.

Cash may be fiat currency, but it’s usable when the grid is down.


22 posted on 04/10/2021 9:25:13 PM PDT by ctdonath2 (The claim of consensus is the first refuge of scoundrels.)
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To: ctdonath2

Most people have no cash to carry these days.

Can you OU use your debit/credit card or ApplePay when the Internet is down?


23 posted on 04/10/2021 9:38:54 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum (Anti-racism looks suspiciously like racism.)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

Funny thing and maybe the person who came up with Bitcoin is/was aware of it.

Distributed Social Network. Been around longer than Bitcoin/crypto but is the same concept.

Multiple servers/computers can be an installation of a Distributed Social Network and they can all communicate with each other yet all your data is kept on your own system.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=Distributed+Social+Network&atb=v1-1&ia=web

It’s mainly been used by anti-establishment types on the left even though these days, it would be better served for use on the right since we’re the ones getting censored.

It is a little technical to be a server and even use the platform but no worse than GAB or Parler or even Facebook was in the beginning for usage and not all that difficult to run a server. It usually requires hosting that has Java which costs a little more and also requires root access to the server aka access to the command line for installation because none of them have a browser based wizard installation like Wordpress or other popular blog, forum software does.


24 posted on 04/10/2021 9:40:49 PM PDT by Pollard ( )
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To: AdmSmith; AnonymousConservative; Arthur Wildfire! March; Berosus; Bockscar; cardinal4; ColdOne; ...
Sounds like a job for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, Apple, and YouTube.

25 posted on 04/10/2021 10:14:14 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie.)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

I have a question for you bitcoin aficionados

Who backs your currency up?


26 posted on 04/10/2021 10:18:15 PM PDT by Truthoverpower (Fraud !!! Now we’re off the TRUMP TRAIN and on the Swamp express to communist hell !! TRUTH! )
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To: Truthoverpower

Isn’t the point that n9 one does?


27 posted on 04/10/2021 11:38:31 PM PDT by nickcarraway
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To: E. Pluribus Unum
How long before the gubmint wants to tax it? If they can't tax it you can't have it. At some point it will leak out that Elon Musk bought Bitcoin at $10k and sold it for $60k and made $100 billion dollars and Biden will say "Where's mine?" Bernie Sanders will grab his chest and AOC will write a bill to confiscate it for climate change.

I can't understand why they have let it go this far.

28 posted on 04/11/2021 12:16:16 AM PDT by chuckles
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

Bitcoin is the beginning platform of the globalists non monetary system where you own nothing get paid through a fictious form of money where they have complete control over you and your families existence.


29 posted on 04/11/2021 2:25:04 AM PDT by ronnie raygun
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To: ronnie raygun

family’s


30 posted on 04/11/2021 2:46:11 AM PDT by Concentrate (ex-texan was right and Always Right was wrong, which is why we lost the election. )
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To: Jonty30
They would only have to trace the pathways if Bitcoin and shut down the relative few that use them.

That's... not exactly how blockchain works.

In a basic blockchain, every participant in the chain has a register of all transactions within the chain. When something changes on one node, every other node is updated immediately with that change. It's an indelible register. The whole point to blockchain is to make fraud impossible. If one node or even a lobe of the chain goes down or becomes unavailable, the rest of the chain continues to function and updates the missing nodes when they return. It's a multi-master system.

Truly the only way to ban Bitcoin would be to completely collapse the Internet into so many shards as to make the blockchain impossible to reconstruct.

31 posted on 04/11/2021 3:27:50 AM PDT by rarestia (Repeal the 17th Amendment and ratify Article the First to give the power back to the people!)
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To: Pollard

Blockchain is a bit more complex than a distributed social/content network. The register concept works similarly to how Active Directory does replication with much greater scale. Every participant in the chain has a copy of the transactions in the chain. It’s impossible to defraud the chain, because the other nodes would recognize the fraud immediately and correct it. It’s not possible to digitally fix or change a transaction.


32 posted on 04/11/2021 3:30:41 AM PDT by rarestia (Repeal the 17th Amendment and ratify Article the First to give the power back to the people!)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

The country would literally stop moving without the internet.

People believe what they”see” on their laptop is “the internet.” They have no idea of how ingrained it is in everything people do these days.


33 posted on 04/11/2021 3:36:41 AM PDT by Vermont Lt
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

The job of Congress is to oversee the minting of coin.

The luxury of Bitcoin, and other electronically generated currencies, is that ‘the value’ is market driven, not ‘the government reserve”.


34 posted on 04/11/2021 4:02:20 AM PDT by Terry L Smith
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To: Pikachu_Dad
Just shutdown the energy hungry mining operations.

It wouldn’t be hard to stop.

As others have pointed out, it would be impossible to stop without destroying the internet. The Chinese could cut themselves off from the rest of the world and stop their bitcoin mining. That would also stop all Chinese foreign business transactions on the internet and a large percentage of their exports.

35 posted on 04/11/2021 4:34:07 AM PDT by palmer (Democracy Dies Six Ways from Sunday)
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To: ctdonath2
Cash may be fiat currency, but it’s usable when the grid is down.

Bitcoin is very usable without the grid. It does require internet, and soon enough that will be from low earth orbit. Right now cell towers rarely go down with the grid.

36 posted on 04/11/2021 4:35:56 AM PDT by palmer (Democracy Dies Six Ways from Sunday)
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To: chuckles
How long before the gubmint wants to tax it?

I've been paying capital gains taxes since 2017. Before that my sales were trivial and nobody really knew what to do. But yeah, it is taxed and it's always pretty dumb to evade taxes.

37 posted on 04/11/2021 4:39:05 AM PDT by palmer (Democracy Dies Six Ways from Sunday)
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To: rarestia; Pollard
Blockchain is a bit more complex than a distributed social/content network.

Not really complex. It is more rigorous. The rigor means that nobody can fake anything unlike a typical DSN/DCN where the content provenance can be faked. You could add the rigor of bitcoin to a DSN, but it would also add a lot of overhead.

38 posted on 04/11/2021 4:41:24 AM PDT by palmer (Democracy Dies Six Ways from Sunday)
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To: Truthoverpower

“I have a question for you bitcoin aficionados

Who backs your currency up?”

Decentralized system integrity and it’s not only Bitcoin. Far from it.


39 posted on 04/11/2021 4:46:58 AM PDT by romanesq (TRUSTY THE PLAN! ChiCom Joe is the Plan? Que magnificent! 👹)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

Observing X has the same problem as Y does not obviate Y’s problem.


40 posted on 04/11/2021 5:15:07 AM PDT by ctdonath2 (The claim of consensus is the first refuge of scoundrels.)
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