Author: Andreas Antonopoulos, one of the most popular Bitcoin proponents, shared his views on the matter of cryptocurrencies and the global financial system in a recent YouTube interview. He discussed Bitcoin’s current and future role in the financial world while also touching on regulations, as well as governmental actions towards digital and fiat currencies.
Broken Traditional Financial System
In a recent interview, Antonopoulos, who is also a host on the famous Let’s Talk Bitcoin podcast, shared his views on the current state of the traditional financial system. He thinks that some of the governmental involvements corrupt it. He also believes that taxing people through inflation to pay off national debts and implementing negative rates is “bad for money” and diminishes its true purpose to “express value and coordinate resource allocation.”
He talked more about how governments initially had a relatively open financial system, but since the 1970s have been slowly migrating towards “a system of totalitarian control.” According to Antonopoulos, they believe it’s their right to keep financial transactions under complete surveillance and be able to “seize, freeze, constrain, and censor financial transactions between people.” He continued by saying that the whole idea is unhealthy, and “its fundamental precepts are fascist in nature.”
Perhaps one of the most recent examples that underscore this point came from the Bank of America. The institution closed the account of the ex-CFO of PayPal without providing any explanation, despite the fact that he has been a client for 20 years.
Even though governments say that surveillance and control are safety measures, Antonopoulos suspects that giving this much power to a handful of people can lead to more significant crimes in the future.
Bitcoin’s Role and Crypto Regulations
With all restrictions and surveillance within the traditional financial system, Antonopoulos believes that this is where Bitcoin comes to life. He said that we live in a globalized world without any practical boundaries, and with over 2 billion people having access to the internet, we need “internet money,” hence Bitcoin’s role.
According to Antonopoulos, the popular cryptocurrency is a very radical form of money and is something completely new, as there has never been a similar asset before. He thinks that its radical and disruptive nature might be the reason why some people are having trouble with understanding and describing it. He also noted that Bitcoin is in its very early stages of evolution, and that fiat money will have a role in its future.
He also touched upon another sensitive topic within the community – cryptocurrency regulations and the attempts from governments and watchdogs to find a suitable solution. Antonopoulos, being a long-time Bitcoin advocate, believes that the technology behind the largest crypto could be the reason why they are yet to succeed:
“They [governments] keep trying to apply all of these regulations, but the thing they fundamentally cannot regulate is the protocol and the idea itself. Because it’s a protocol and in pure terms – a technology based on mathematics – there’s nothing to regulate there, it’s simply an idea […] Governments are desperately trying to regulate the edges of the system which is futile. The fundamental reason why it is futile is because Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies do not exist in a single jurisdiction, they’re truly transnational. They are so poorly understood by regulators that they can’t even begin to approach them, so all they can do is regulate the banks that operate around them.”
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