Bitcoin plus not Working
Of course, any true Bitcoin mavens first reaction to that is going to be: Bitcoin doesn't have to happen in Washington. It only has to happen on the blockchain and in individual owners/users (hopefully secure and possibly secret) wallets.
That is the important point about Bitcoin and should be front and centered in any discussion about the politics that haunt and hound the protocol and the cryptocurrency. Still, as I wrote last May, while government can neither make Bitcoin happen nor stop it from happening, it can try to make life difficult and annoying for its users, whether that comes in for allegedly using Bitcoin to "launder money".
The piece discusses the Bitcoin Foundation and Jerry Brito, who has written early and often for Reason on Bitcoin issues—see his groundbreaking December 2013 feature on all the ways Bitcoin will likely change the world beyond being an awesome currency.
It also limns a split in the ideological and practical world of Bitcoin I've written about before. As I put it back in April:
between the crypto-anarchists from whom Bitcoin arose and who
were its first adopters, and the big-time legitimate businesses
stepping in to normalize the market, who would just as soon lose
the stink of weirdo anarchism surrounding Bitcoin that can scare
off big money.
Moody's story talks of:
an independent San Diego, California-based entrepreneur named Brett Stapper, the founder of Falcon Global Capital, [who is late May] filed paperwork to lobby Congress on cryptocurrency issues. In an interview with Yahoo News, Stapper said he’s in the process of coordinating with a law firm — he won’t say which — to organize lobby days and post a “practical guide” to Bitcoin online.
“We want to work with regulators. We want to work with governments, ” Stapper said. “We’re not libertarians who see this as a thing that is possible on a massive scale without the help of these organizations.”
