You talk in your book about crypto and CBDs. What kind of threat do they pose?

Cryptocurrencies are here and now for the underground economony and that's a broad term I use to refer to tax evasion, regulatory evasion, it doesn't all have to do with drug trades and human trafficking and military equipment. But the global underground economy's maybe $20 trillion, $25 trillion and crypto is already very heavily used there. It used to be all dollar. So that part of the dollar footprint is already going. But I think in the legal economy, I personally think we would be crazy to allow that, just crazy. But on the other hand...I have to say there's a lot of powerful political forces in Washington right now pushing in htat direction. But I don't think it makes any sense to allow crypto to replace the dollar in legal transactions.

I notice there's a bill or proposal in congress to allow individuals to pay their taxes in BTC without having to pay capital gains.

This stuff's all crazy. I mean so....what they're trying to do is trying put in place laws and regs that make it politically difficult to unwind what was a very bad policy to fully deregulate crypto, which is what they're trying to do. Why don't we want to do that? Well, first of all, why is crypto so popular? It's not just because of capital gains, it's because you can do things psuedononymously, you can do things anonymously, and that's fine up to a point. We can already do that with cash. The question's, how far do we want to let it go? So again, I think
it's not that there's not innovation, block chain's great, stablecoins have a future. But these laws that were passed, or being passed, they seem to not ask anyone outside the industry what....and sort of done such a 180 from what the Biden administration was doing. It was moving too slow...They cut things loose that they shouldn't have. Trump is a pragmatist, if anything. So I sorta think he'll reign it in once he sees what's going wrong. But for now, a lot of this stuff, the 401k plans, they want to let you hold BTC in your 401k, same thing. They want to get a lot of little voters, create a voting block that doesn't want to put the genie back in the bottle. But I'm telling you they're going to have to eventually.

Originally Posted By heavily_armed:
What's the thing that's going to force the .gov to put the genie back in the bottle eventually?

Originally Posted By grendelbane:

I would ask what is the thing that would enable the government to put the genie back in the bottle.