Author: Wang Chao
After a sharp sell-off earlier this week, Bitcoin rebounded strongly, breaking through the $40,000 mark in intraday trading, which quickly boosted traders’ confidence.
“This bubble does not look like it will burst,” said Don Guo, CEO of Brotagon Fintech Group. This helps smaller cryptocurrency exchanges obtain larger liquidity pools from larger exchanges.
European Central Bank President Lagarde said at a Reuters event on Wednesday that Bitcoin is a “highly speculative asset.” Together with some regulatory agencies from all over the world, she called for the implementation of global rules for cryptocurrencies. Lagarde said: “There must be supervision.” This must be implemented and agreed by all parties. “
The price of Bitcoin doubled in 2019, quadrupled last year, and increased by 32% in the first two weeks of 2021 alone. This quickly brought the market value of this cryptocurrency to $709 billion.
Currently, Biden’s nominees and advisers have expressed their views on Bitcoin. And they may reflect Biden’s attitude towards decentralization and cryptocurrency.
Perhaps the most important of these is Janet Yellen, the head of the Treasury Department nominated by Biden. She was the chairman of economic advisors during the Clinton era and the chairman of the Federal Reserve System. She once stated that “I am not a fan of Bitcoin” and that many “transactions that do occur on Bitcoin are illegal and illegal transactions.” In addition, she also speculated that Bitcoin’s “extremely high” energy usage and anonymous cryptocurrency caused network security concerns.
The Office of Currency Supervision (OCC) is set up under the Ministry of Finance, and its leadership is designated by the Minister of Finance. The current position is Brian Brooks, Coinbase’s chief legal officer, who was considered to be friendly to cryptocurrencies and allowed banks to reserve USD stablecoins. However, he is likely to be replaced by someone who is indifferent to cryptocurrency, or may be hostile to cryptocurrency to some extent.
The Foreign Assets Control Department of the U.S. Treasury Department can also blacklist cryptocurrency addresses related to sanctioned individuals. In addition, FinCEN is also a department of the U.S. Department of the Treasury and has huge powers to enforce law against money laundering violations. It is responsible for dealing with the transactions that are mixed into Bitcoin and enforcing the “Bank Secrecy Act.”
It is expected that the Ministry of Finance, led by someone, will be skeptical of the premise of anonymous or pseudonymous cryptocurrency, and will proceed more along the line of these enforcement actions to target sanctioned cryptocurrency holders, with “serious The accusations of “and bad” deal with “dark web criminals” in order to implement relevant supervision of certain privacy tools in the Bitcoin field.
The other is Biden’s adviser, Gary Gensler, who led the CFTC during the Obama administration. He has been invited to lead the financial policy transition team of the new Biden administration. Before this, he seemed to be skeptical of the traditional financial system and expressed his support for Bitcoin earlier.
In Biden’s entire team, themes such as boosting fiscal policy and monetary policy to solve the unemployment problem, protecting investors, and breaking the technology monopoly are all sympathetic. These themes and variables will be related to how the Biden administration treats Bitcoin.
However, perhaps the most important variable is Biden himself. Historically, he has always opposed cryptocurrency. In the Senate, he proposed two bills with strong anti-encryption language. In fact, it was his two bills that inspired Hal Finney to work on PGP encryption. Perhaps, in the future, Bitcoin itself will do the same.