Good question. Treasury and FCC are VERY different departments. FCC is ~1k people and dominated by political commissioners. Treasury is ~80k people and has politically appointed leadership but also a much deeper bench of career civil servants. Those people will read those comments and will make changes to their proposed rules based on thoughtful comments and feedback from stakeholders. They may not make the change you want, but they will read your feedback and take it into account. If you do choose to comment, DO NOT use form letters or go on rants. Establish your interest, perspective, and authority, and state your position clearly with supporting data. And remember: everything you say goes into the public record
Source: got a large US govt to tweak regs based on data, common sense, 0 lobbying and 0 money.
I feel your frustration, but worry that this sort of defeatist attitude (if adopted by many) will end poorly.
We have to be resilient. If we as citizens want to have any say in government, we need to engage despite frustrations, setbacks, and what even appears to be bad faith attempts to circumvent established procedures like this seems to be (and the FCC net neutrality comment process was).
Virtually no one (especially Coinbase users) is actually using Bitcoin as money, so this seems like only a symbolic violation of privacy but not a practical one. 99% of Coinbase users are trading crypto like stocks and treating their holdings as assets, not currency. Every stock sale is already reported to the government, so this just puts the reality of crypto on par with equities.
It’s good to have regulations to control the unorganised crypto market. It will lead to be able to extract information about people collecting ransom in crypto for hacks. At the end of the day Bitcoin needs to be converted to other fiat currencies for any real use, otherwise it’s a worthless series of bytes.
Bitcoin failed as currency and now it’s just a proxy to gamble for investors without transparency and controls like a typical stock or commodities market. Worst part is, it has become a de-facto standard to extract ransom for hacks or any illegal activity.
One way or another I feel like more regulation is coming; the promises of cryptocurrencies in general are often at odds with what centralized governments want, and governments have more power, so will tend to get their way over time.
The short comment period is pretty terrible here too though, among other things.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 36.8 ms ] threadEdit: a 15 day comment period in the holiday season shows exactly how much they care about your comments.
Source: got a large US govt to tweak regs based on data, common sense, 0 lobbying and 0 money.
We have to be resilient. If we as citizens want to have any say in government, we need to engage despite frustrations, setbacks, and what even appears to be bad faith attempts to circumvent established procedures like this seems to be (and the FCC net neutrality comment process was).
Bitcoin failed as currency and now it’s just a proxy to gamble for investors without transparency and controls like a typical stock or commodities market. Worst part is, it has become a de-facto standard to extract ransom for hacks or any illegal activity.
Well...don't do that.
The short comment period is pretty terrible here too though, among other things.