A House Energy Subcommittee Hearing entertains dangerous and disingenuous rhetoric against technologies for freedom. If you are a government that wants to stop bitcoin, what can you do? Can you make people think it is killing the planet? Authoritarian governments try. The Chinese Communist Party—ever the tree-huggers—clamped down on cryptocurrency last [...]
The U.S. dominated the mining marketplace in 2021. It's something of a running joke that China bans bitcoin every year. It's not hard to see why the famously centralized Chinese state might look askance at a fundamentally decentralized and uncontrollable tool for monetary sovereignty, especially at a time when the CCP is [...]
Politicians attack dollar-backed cryptocurrencies called “stablecoins” and the decentralized finance it enables. The United States federal government is pretty insecure these days. Inflation is high, discontent higher, and no one is quite sure how to sort out our monetary mess. Government agents will not examine their bad choices and change course. They will [...]
WhatsApp and iMessage are not as private as you might think. Most message apps tout their privacy features in some way. It is common to hear marketing language about "end-to-end encryption" and "private messaging" for basically every communications app out there. While it's great that encryption has become a selling [...]
Meet the new hype cycle about new tools for online decentralization. Technological improvements have tended to follow a predictable pattern of initial excitement, subsequent disappointment, and eventual resurgence called a hype cycle. First, a new technology is dreamed or introduced, and suddenly everyone can't stop talking about how it is going [...]
The United States Government controls a sprawling financial surveillance system that attracts little notice or mention outside of industry and policy circles. The roots of this surveillance infrastructure were seeded in the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, which initially intended to clamp down on money laundering but has since expanded to [...]
In our world of touch-free payments and digital wallets, many take cash for granted. It’s slow, it can be lost, and it doesn’t even have a rewards program. Some businesses have stopped accepting cash altogether, perhaps because it is seen as cumbersome and unnecessary. We should push against the move [...]
With “keyword warrants,” anyone who queries certain terms on search engines will get caught in the surveillance dragnet. It's been 20 years since 9/11, which means it's also been 20 years since America's public debates about government surveillance under laws like the PATRIOT Act. It's a bit amusing to look [...]
ANDREA O'SULLIVAN September 14, 2021 Cryptocurrency is far from unregulated. In the United States, it is often overregulated. This is a big enough problem when the rules are too numerous or onerous. But to make matters worse, the rules can also be vague. And as a cherry on top, regulating agencies may [...]
ANDREA O'SULLIVAN August 8, 2021 There are a lot of ways to look at the collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghanistan government into the hands of the ever-patient Taliban. It's a pathetic and predictable end to decades of wasteful war-driven nation-building in a faraway steppe. On a deeper level, it illustrates the limits of imposing liberalism [...]
