Senate Banking Committee Hearing on Bitcoin [video]

banking.senate.gov

37 points·rxl··5 comments

Bottom line, except for Gallipi (BitPay CEO) no one in this hearing on either side understood bitcoin.

They could have replaced the word "Bitcoin" with the word "eGold" and had the same amount of substance.

Yesterday was different.

I thought some of the remarks by Smocer on the liquidity in the global market was pretty telling (and the comparative lack of it in the US) in that the US will not be on the edge of innovation in this space (as of now) and from the actions of the USG compared to say other governments have (or lack of) elsewhere already have shown the direction. I keep thinking of the circumstances of mt.gox account on dwolla being seized.

And then you have the issue of the banks giving businesses who are willing to jump through the hoops the run around… At this point it would be awesome if the Google's and Apple's use their off shore banking licenses (and cash) and take accounts for bitcoin service companies from the US or globally, possibly circumventing their repatriation issues too… win/win, no?

I agree on the liquidity discussion. However, all of the big five want to control the payment space (Amazon coin, google wallet, Facebook bucks etc) and will avoid bitcoin as long as possible.

So to summarize, the three important issues raised:

1. How do you collect taxes and avoid tax evasion.

2. Illicit activity control in the vein of what is done to curb online gambling (Visa/Mastercard act as enforcers by forbidding service to such businesses).

3. What kind of regulation would do the job (whatever that might be) while at the same time remain competitive with other nations. IRRC the needs for regulation focused mostly on consumer protection.

To answer (3), see Section III (pages 31-33):

http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/20131118.hsgacstatemen...

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