This isn't an "action by Congress". It's somebody's document made up to look like a draft bill. There's no such bill on congress.gov.<p>Who's "Ryan Todd", anyway?
I'm not big into politics but my understanding is these click bait bills are drafted and thrown out on a weekly basis. The purpose of these bills that will never pass is so when people try to get re-elected they can say things like "I tried to stop Facebook from interfering with our financial system" or something along those lines that appeals to their base.
I lose faith in representative democracy by the day. I certainly don't feel like my opinions are being represented 99% of the time. But the vast majority of Americans are completely unaware of what's happening in Congress at any given time.<p>I've thought of building an app where voters could enter their opinions and be notified whenever their representatives vote for or against their views, but I can't figure out monetization.
Disclaimer: I work on a decentralized cryptocurrency<p>For the HN'ers who want to jump in and evangelize cryptocurrencies:<p>Libra is not a cryptocurrency. It is a Facebook-controlled private currency intended to circumvent the international banking system. Facebook, here, is in every way a financial institution.<p>Please don't let them fool you. The "decentralized" "byzantine-fault tolerant" "cryptocurrency" aspect is just tacked on as a marketing ploy.
A cursory reading of this bill suggests that it blocks “large utility platforms” from creating “digital assets” used as a “medium of exchange or use of value”.<p>1) Does this language even cover Facebook’s Libra? They’ve been careful to legally insulate themselves somewhat from Calibra / constrain their governance over Libra for this very reason.<p>2) Wouldn’t this bill simply open a space for independent projects like Theil and Altman’s Reserve currency to do the same thing (establish a self-stabilizing cryptocurrency in developing national markets) with complete impunity? In what sense does this bill meaningfully restrict “big tech” if Facebook stakeholder Theil wins big either way?<p>3) Assuming 1 and 2 are real problems, what would an appropriate response to projects like Libra be? Short of banning domestic cryptocurrency trade more broadly, I’m not sure what a sufficiently restrictive law would look like.
If you agree that:<p>1) U.S. economic policy should be set by democratically elected people, and that<p>2) Facebook (or the Libra consortium) is not democratically elected, and that<p>3) Government monetary policy (aka the USD) stabilizes the economy,<p>Then, consider supporting bills like this. (I'm sure it has problems and will be rewritten many times)
The free peoples of the world need tools to prevent these relentless assaults on our liberties.<p>Unfortunately, we’ve been sociologically engineered to desire a false sense of safety delivered by “benevolent” overlords, instead of actual community interdependence.<p>Removal of any sense or ability for individual volition in matters of personal commerce is one of the final steps toward complete servitude.<p>Fortunately, help is at hand. A new generation of decentralized algorithms supporting cryptocurrency commerce resistant to (state-initiated) Network Partitions will support unstoppable commerce between independent agents, and will work at small (local network) scale, as securely and easily as at global scale (> millions of aggregate transact per second).<p>And not a moment too soon.