The Crypto Market of the Future Needs a Flexible Legal Framework

Keep in mind what is at stake in the debate over digital assets as Congress revisits the issue of legislating digital assets and the Securities and Exchange Commission fires off fresh salvos against significant actors in the sector.

This conflict involves more than simply Bitcoin. The conflict over your digital life and whether you actually own or have any control over it is considerably more significant.

Everything is moving towards digitization. Your tweets, images, videos, emails, and other digital encodings all flow in unison. Your phone calls are sent as a series of digital bits called ones and zeros. Your Facebook, Twitter, online dating profile, and company website all contribute to your digital presence. You can watch digital entertainment. a Google search. Your conversations with chatbots that use AI.

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Your actions are all documented digitally in a digital place that you don’t own, are visible to strangers, are governed by business terms and conditions that, let’s face it, you didn’t read, and are just waiting to be packaged and sold for targeted advertising or to be used against you in court.

Of course, your money is digital. Even if you may have a few paper dollars, the money you have in the bank is an entry in a digital ledger. Your 401(k) or mutual fund is a digital record of your fractional ownership of those digital records, just as your securities are a digital record of your share ownership.

Food, clothing, and shelter — even the most fundamental physical necessities of life — are all made possible by digital assets. JPEGs are clicked to place meal orders. Clothes can be purchased online simply clicking on digital images. Sliced up for investors, your home is financed as a residential mortgage-backed instrument. Investors pay with digital currency to purchase a digital representation of a digital portion of your property.

The future is today, and digital assets are the future.

People frequently think “cryptocurrency” when they hear the term “digital assets.” With the unfortunate collapses of Terra, Three Arrows, and most notoriously, FTX, cryptocurrency is the most obvious example.

Cryptocurrency has had tremendous growth and development over the past five years, despite current turbulence. Engineers, programmers, designers, managers, bankers, accountants, and lawyers all poured their skills and innovative ideas into digital assets as a result of the cryptocurrency boom.

Numerous IT firms will endure this bad market in cryptocurrencies. The demise of a few crypto enterprises won’t fundamentally influence the expansion of blockchain technology and digital assets, much as the death of numerous dot com companies in 2001 had little impact on the long-term supremacy of the internet.

Blockchains continue to be unwieldy and slow. For regular consumers, they are too complicated to use. There are too many security gaps in them. But a blockchain’s key insight is unquestionably a technological advance. When used properly, blockchain is a superior method of storing data since it is more transparent and secure.

It needs labour and is difficult to perform properly. However, the work is still being done, both at staid financial institutions and flashy startups, who are all making the necessary investments in programmers and coffee to create better systems.

What if you could always see your money and handle your own bill-paying, negating the need for a bank with all of its regulations, costs, and overhead? Everything is doable. Digital assets are really just software, and software has as many applications as there are people.

These revolutionary developments are improbable, though, if America continues on its current course. All forms of cryptocurrencies are being strictly regulated by US authorities. Thoughtful and fresh legislation has been filed in Congress to regulate digital assets, but the process can be cumbersome, slow, and unreliable. As a result, cryptocurrency businesses are relocating to other countries, such as Europe, the UK, Japan, the Caribbean, and others, where the legal landscape is more lucid.

It’s unfortunate because the law governing cryptocurrencies precedes the law governing other digital assets. Just the first step, money. People are aware of the need for financial stability right away, making it unlikely that they will steal from you. It is also simple to comprehend the significance of financial privacy. Nobody should know what church you donated to, what medications you purchased, where you went, or how much (and for whom) you spent on flowers. Your business is it.

However, the conflict over cryptocurrencies today will eventually affect all digital assets. The struggle today is for secure and private control of your finances. The conflict of tomorrow is for secure, private control of everything else. The policies we establish for digital assets in one area will have an impact on policies for all of them. You are currently surrounded by digital technology, yet you do not currently possess any of it.

Will society as a whole accept the possession and control of our most private and valuable information by corporate intermediaries that are beholden to shareholders (but not you)? Or are we going to struggle for control over our own digital assets — our money, our entertainment, our communications, and our own public image — individually and as a group?

Legal conflicts over digital assets are conflicts over the course of our society as a whole. We resort to Congress because regulators are determined to simply shut down cryptocurrency.

America urgently requires a legal framework that will permit experimentation and innovation, allow our most inventive minds to devise privacy and security safeguards for our personal assets, and guarantee that your digital assets — the lifeblood of the twenty-first century — remain private, under your control, and are not sold for the benefit of others.