The current draft of the GENIUS Act elevates centralized entities in overseeing stablecoins. Democrats should take the right stand against it, says Hermine Wong.

… there’s a whole voter base of millions of young men who turned to crypto because of their mistrust of Wall Street and Big Tech. The same mistrust Democrats share of those same centralized entities. Democrats don’t have to embrace hype coins or endorse bad legislation. In fact, they shouldn’t. But they do need to actually learn to embrace the core values of the builders in the crypto community: individual digital ownership and decentralization.

Democrats also need to start demonstrating this now. They can’t risk another cycle without bringing young men back under the tent. One cycle can be a blip, but two cycles in a row becomes a habit, and habits are hard to break.

The GENIUS Act is actually the perfect opportunity for the Democrats to show that they’re a party that is more interested in voters than soundbites against Trump. The current draft is 57 pages of legislative jargon to elevate the roles of centralized entities in overseeing stablecoins. No surprise. Remember those 50 individuals who raised $260 million for the crypto Super PAC? They’ll definitely benefit from an increased reliance on their intermediation.

But embedded in the draft legislation is a small definition that is doing a lot of work, and that’s the definition of “distributed ledger.” Instead of hating on Trump, the Democrats could band together to say that the definition doesn’t require decentralization or network security, and until that happens, they can’t advance a stablecoin bill that only promotes fee-taking central intermediaries. Now that could be the beginning of a real sea-change.

The Democrats wouldn’t even need to mention Trump. The reality would be that none of the Trump family crypto projects would survive a definition that required true decentralization.

So here’s the real question: do Democrats want to keep losing elections just to avoid learning new tech? Or are they finally ready to act like a party that wants to win votes again?

  • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    1 day ago

    This guy is missing a key point here, although he almost gets there:

    Crypto PACs have raised over $260 million, making crypto the sixth largest Super PAC, dwarfing any other industry-supported Super PAC (all the others are related to a particular party or candidate). But those donations came from just 50 individuals. That’s not a movement. It’s a small elevator lobby.

    Those 50 individuals aren’t necessarily the smartest people, or the most effective political leaders. They ran the right software at the right time, and now have system-breaking amounts of money. (When Bitcoin first came out, you got 50 BTC for finding a block, and could still do it on the hardware in your basement. That wasn’t even worth 10 cents back then, but is $5 million at today’s prices. And you find blocks every 10 minutes…)

    And in the campaign finance infrastructure that Republicans enabled after Citizen’s United, this gives these 50 people (and their spare horde of BTC) an unduly large influence on our politics.

    This is going to impact any Crypto legislation going forward. Anything that doesn’t directly benefit those 50 people will be at a severe disadvantage. And guess what? Our President is doing the job as a side-gig, he makes most of his money selling shitcoins.

    There is simply going to be no way to address Crypto regulations until Campaign Finance is addressed. Because until it is, the cryptobros will just keep shoveling money into our elections to get the outcomes they want.