Here is the letter:
Dear U.S. Congressional Leadership, Committee Chairs and Ranking Members,
We are 26 computer scientists, software engineers, and technologists who have spent decades working in these fields producing innovative and effective products for a variety of applications in database technology, cryptography, open-source software, and financial technology applications.
Today, we write to you urging the Committee to take a critical, skeptical approach toward industry claims that crypto-assets (sometimes called cryptocurrencies, crypto tokens, or web3) are an innovative technology that is unreservedly good. We urge you to resist pressure from digital asset industry financiers, lobbyists, and boosters to create a regulatory safe haven for these risky, flawed, and unproven digital financial instruments and to instead take an approach that protects the public interest and ensures technology is deployed in genuine service to the needs of ordinary citizens.
We strongly disagree with the narrative—peddled by those with a financial stake in the crypto-asset industry—that these technologies represent a positive financial innovation and are in any way suited to solving the financial problems facing ordinary Americans.
Not all innovation is unqualifiedly good; not everything that we can build should be built. The history of technology is full of dead ends, false starts, and wrong turns. Append-only digital ledgers are not a new innovation. They have been known and used since 1980 for rather limited functions.
As software engineers and technologists with deep expertise in our fields, we dispute the claims made in recent years about the novelty and potential of blockchain technology. Blockchain technology cannot, and will not, have transaction reversal mechanisms because they are antithetical to its base design. Similarly, most public blockchain-based financial products are a disaster for financial privacy; the exceptions are a handful of emerging privacy-focused blockchain finance alternatives, and these are a gift to money-launderers. Financial technologies that serve the public must always have mechanisms for fraud mitigation and allow a human-in-the-loop to reverse transactions; blockchain permits neither.
By its very design, blockchain technology, specifically so-called “public blockchains”, are poorly suited for just about every purpose currently touted as a present or potential source of public benefit. From its inception, this technology has been a solution in search of a problem and has now latched onto concepts such as financial inclusion and data transparency to justify its existence, despite far better solutions already in use. After more than thirteen years of development, it has severe limitations and design flaws that preclude almost all applications that deal with public customer data and regulated financial transactions and are not an improvement on existing non-blockchain solutions.
Finally, blockchain technologies facilitate few, if any, real-economy uses. On the other hand, the underlying crypto-assets have been the vehicle for unsound and highly volatile speculative investment schemes that are being actively promoted to retail investors who may be unable to understand their nature and risk. Other significant externalities include threats to national security through money laundering and ransomware attacks, financial stability risks from high price volatility, speculation and susceptibility to run risk, massive climate emissions from the proof-of-work technology utilized by some of the most widely traded crypto-assets, and investor risk from large scale scams and other criminal financial activity.
We ask you to take a truly responsible approach to technological innovation and ensure that individuals in the US and elsewhere are not left vulnerable to predatory finance, fraud, and systemic economic risks in the name of technological potential which does not exist.
The risks and externalities related to blockchain technologies and crypto-asset investments are neither isolated nor are they the growing pains of a nascent technology. They are the inevitable outcomes of a technology that is not built for purpose and will remain forever unsuitable as a foundation for large-scale economic activity.
Given these risks and externalities, together with the—at best still-ambiguous and at worst non-existent—uses of blockchain, we recommend that the Committee look beyond the hype and bluster of the crypto industry and understand not only its inherent flaws and extraordinary defects but also the litany of technological fallacies it is built upon.
We need to act now to protect investors and the global financial marketplace from the severe risks posed by crypto-assets and must not be distracted by technical obfuscations which mask an abject lack of technological utility. We thank you for your leadership on financial technology and regulation and urge you to consider our objective and independent expert judgments to guide your legislative priorities, which we remain happy to discuss anytime.
WHAT IS MOENY
Since Li Ka-shing, Li Yanhong, And Zuckerberg chose to enter the metasurverse, and the metasurverse came into people's view, I don't know if they know what the metasurverse is. You might think that with all their success, there would be no problem. The fact that they have made achievements in the past does not indicate that they have a great understanding of the new field.
The meta-universe has six blocks, and its most important and basic economic system is blockchain technology. What is blockchain technology? Most of them don't, they don't know the basic logic of blockchain technology that we're talking about, they don't know the re-Walth that we're talking about recently. We do not know the basic consensus trust problem, however, we are also in practice to block chain landing applications, to solve the problem of hashing.
For the most basic blockchain technology, I have mastered the code that makes up it, the data, and the direction of its extension
The development of blockchain to the present, but also extended many modes, chain games, decentralized exchanges, metaverse, and so on. There are some true and some false, but we all remember satoshi nakamoto's words, if you don't trust me, I will have no time to explain to you, so BTC to build blockchain technology is the essence of everything
At a time of cholera, when communication is difficult and flights are suspended, we can assume that if conflicts in the world intensify, leading to local wars and even affecting the whole world, in today's globalization, it will have a far-reaching impact. To return to the essence of everything, the first thing for human beings is survival, coordinated development of group society, cooperation and consensus. If the social order breaks down, how can that person survive independently, and it is difficult for individuals to return to the age that has been adapted to the industrialization, we return to our roots, to make people cooperate again, which undoubtedly needs to solve the problem of people's trust
Trust is fundamentally about consensus. In the 19th century, the West had established the gold standard system, and the Bretton Woods system of the United States also broke away from the link with gold. The US dollar became the circulating currency of the world, but it did not constitute credit. Dollar hegemony.
Hayek proposed a world free economy, avoiding the economic intervention of power in the world, and it was not until 2009 that blockchain saw the dawn of the economy into a decentralized, restricted, verifiable, by a series of mathematical logic codes constitute the basic trust
Today, the world is diversified and contradictory. It not only has the gold standard in the past, but also the currency standard, the US dollar and the RMB. Economy, culture and civilization all have unique systems.
There are 7.6 billion people in the world, and interpersonal links are structured, social order is stable, and individuals are connecting with the world society
