WASHINGTON—The U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs recent hearing on cryptocurrency and blockchain technology regulation offered some insights on the practicality of implementing a cryptocurrency ban, as some have proposed.
As Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R-ID) observed, “If the United States were to decide we don’t want cryptocurrency to happen in the United States and tried to ban it, I’m pretty confident we couldn’t succeed in doing that because this is a global innovation.”
“He was eluding to the technical difficulties in banning a decentralized network that anyone is free to use and access through an Internet connection,” explained Dash News.
Jeremy Allaire, co-founder and CEO of global financial services company Circle, testified in response.
‘Just a Piece of Software’
“I think the challenge that we all face with this is some of these cryptocurrencies — they’re literally just a piece of open-source software,” stated Allaire. “There’s nothing else. It exists on the Internet, it’s open-source software, anyone can implement it, it runs wherever the Internet runs, and these have a monetary policy where these assets are algorithmically generated … That is a challenge that every government in the world now faces — that money, digital money, will move frictionlessly everywhere in the world at the speed of the Internet.”
This comes amid increasing cryptocurrency news among government officials with some calling for bans, some calling for hearings, and others calling for cryptocurrency to simply be left alone, Dash News added.