Elizabeth Warren's Bitcoin Derangement Syndrome Hits New All-Time High
Elizabeth Warren's Bitcoin Derangement Syndrome Hits New All-Time High
Warren thinks Bitcoin is a scam, but wants to tax and surveil the ever-living hell of your satoshis.
The senior US Senator from the state of Massachusetts sees no utility for Bitcoin. At least for the good guys.
If it isn’t “just air,” as Elizabeth Warren told NBC News’ Chuck Todd last year, it’s a “tool of criminals and terrorists”. For her, Bitcoin is a fictional invention that happens to live rent-free in her head.
And it turns out, she’s just getting started.
In just the last week, deathly concerned that someone, somewhere is stacking sats and transacting peer-to-peer on the Bitcoin network, Sen. Warren has introduced legislation to try demask self-custodial wallets and sent letters to both the IRS and the Treasury Department demanding that “more be done” to enforce stringent tax reporting rules on “crypto billionaires”.
Let me get this straight.
Elizabeth Warren thinks Bitcoin is a scam full of air, but she’s incredibly eager to tax the ever-living hell out of Bitcoin holders in order to fund her progressive policy wishlist. Makes sense.
The bill introduced by Warren and her deranged boomer colleagues Sens. Roger Marshall, Joe Manchin, and Lindsey Graham is the Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2023.
It mostly targets crypto traders who degen in and out of trades, but for Bitcoiners, the most offensive section is the attempt to shoehorn what they call “unhosted wallets” into the regime of anti-money laundering rules.
The bill aims to insert “unhosted wallet providers,” meaning open source developers who publish code to allow you to sovereignly hold your public/private key Bitcoin setup, as entities to which these rules would apply.
We know this nonsense from the EU’s MiCA legislation, which once heavily underscored the need to track every living soul transacting with an “unhosted” wallet until it was finally removed by some of the more sane skulls in Brussels.
Skipping over the obvious lunacy of “unhosted” as opposed to self-custodial, it is clear that Warren and her regulation-trigger-happy Senate friends see Bitcoin as a threat not just to the US economy, but to the ability of the federal government to squeeze every last tax dollar out of citizens to fund our $32 trillion US national debt — plus the additional spending they’re working really hard to pass.
For years, Warren has argued that Bitcoin and its crypto offspring are gambling tokens worth nothing. But at the same time, she wants to use government force to vaccuum up the massive GAINZ of folks who’ve been smart enough to HODL the world’s hardest asset.
I’ve previously written about why the progressives’ aversion to Bitcoin makes no logical sense considering the core tentants of their philosophy and world view. But power is a more attractive pursuit than consistency with fundamental idelogy.
Perhaps that’s why Warren is a massive champion of a Central Bank Digital Currency, and sees that goal as the only positive aspect to come from this whole Bitcoin “farce”.
In the end, we know Democratic Senators who fail to grasp the benefits of Bitcoin will end up regretting it one way or another.
Regardless, the entire advantage of the Bitcoin network is that we don’t really need to care what anyone in Washington, D.C. thinks, or even Brussels or London for that matter. The next block ticks on.
We only need Bitcoin addresses, private keys, and people willing to embrace financial sovereignty. The rest is all noise.
Best,
Yaël
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