Sept. 19, 2022: Digital Asset Framework 🇺🇸📜
White House Crypto Reports Receive Neutral to Negative Response
The US released its crypto regulation framework last week, to relatively little fanfare. Perhaps the crypto community didn’t feel it to be terribly relevant. Reaction was fairly quiet… or possibly there’s just nobody left in the community after we all got mauled by bears?
What was in the Framework?
The “framework” is mostly a lengthy summary statement released concurrent with several promised in-depth reports. The actual reports were somewhat buried, inexplicably not even hyperlinked in the main summary. The statement alludes to nine total reports, but we’ve only found five:
Technical Design Choices for a CBDC (actually an interesting read)
Fun fact: apparently whitehouse.gov is hosted on a Wordpress blog, because of course it is.
If all this looks like nothing but a whole bunch of reports, it’s because this is how bloated bureaucracies operate. In fact, this might be considered relatively “swift” or “bold” in government terms. The previous executive order tasked a bunch of agencies with writing some reports. Now they are writing some reports! Shocking!
A surplus of PDFs is far from the tyrannical bogeyman described by the most ardent libertarians, though one may properly lament the inefficiencies. Our government can be modeled as an engine that takes roughly half of our money in taxes and uses it to employ ~10-25% of the population to produce a lot of reports.
The horse race within DC amounts to some jockeying over which particular agency will get which particular authority over which particular facet of cryptocurrency. Various agencies are competing to see who gets the most power and influence over the sector, and thus the report was of most interest to agency staffers. Will the SEC or the CFTC have more authority? 🍿🍿🍿
On this level, this framework is what you’d expect from a document generated by a massive committee process, (dubbed the “interagency” approach). When dealing with loads of infighting, the path of least resistance is to produce guidance that carefully angers nobody and merely reaffirms the status quo. That’s exactly how much of the report reads: a laundry list of government agencies and a description of what they’re currently doing.
