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More than two dozen high-profile tech experts have signed on to a letter asking congressional leaders to view the booming crypto industry skeptically, arguing that claims the crypto-asset industry is “in any way suited to solving the financial problems facing ordinary Americans” are simply “peddled by those with a financial stake” in its success.
The letter, published Wednesday and addressed to congressional leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, among others, was signed by 26 industry experts, including Harvard's Bruce Schneier and Google Cloud principal engineer Kelsey Hightower.
“We urge you to resist pressure from digital asset industry financiers, lobbyists, and boosters to create a regulatory safe haven for these risky, flawed, and unproven digital financial instruments and to instead take an approach that protects the public interest and ensures technology is deployed in genuine service to the needs of ordinary citizens,” the letter reads.
“We strongly disagree with the narrative — peddled by those with a financial stake in the crypto-asset industry — that these technologies represent a positive financial innovation and are in any way suited to solving the financial problems facing ordinary Americans.
“Not all innovation is unqualifiedly good; not everything that we can build should be built. The history of technology is full of dead ends, false starts, and wrong turns. Append-only digital ledgers are not a new innovation. They have been known and used since 1980 for rather limited functions.”
Blockchain technology, the signatories argue, is “poorly suited for just about every purpose currently touted as a present or potential source of public benefit” and call it “a solution in search of a problem.”
The cryptocurrency sector still has a market cap of $1.27 trillion, despite a lengthy slide, according to CoinGecko, with the leading digital token bitcoin making up for $562 billion of that.
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