Bitcoin Ban in the U.S. is Now Past the Catastrophic Risk
Bitcoin (BTC) had a fraught relationship with governments globally since they created it more than a decade ago.
The United States looked into the possible scenario of shutting down BTC back in 2012. And in the previous month, President Donald Trump told Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to concentrate on a Bitcoin clampdown over negotiating a China trade deal the past year.
Furthermore, as BTC is gaining more support on Wall Street and Washington, Barry Silbert, the chief executive of major Bitcoin and cryptocurrency investor Digital Currency Group, thinks that the risk of a catastrophic U.S. BTC ban is a thing of the past.
Silbert stated during an investor call, “For the first time ever, we’re past the ban bitcoin perceived risk.”
According to Silber, the industry is so far doing well. It is much better off than it has ever been from a relationship perspective. And this was all due to work done to educate policymakers of the benefits of this asset class, pushing that the catastrophic policy risk is behind them.
A subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, Grayscale, reported this week that institutional demand for Bitcoin is surging during the coronavirus crisis. It posted its biggest-ever quarterly inflows of nearly $1 billion. And this almost doubles from more than $500 million in the first quarter.
The 2017 Bull Run
The comments from Silbert arrived following the reports of Donald Trump discussions with Steve Mnuchin last month. He told him to go after Bitcoin in the wake of BTC’s soaring 2017 bull run. It saw the price jump from below $1,000 per BTC at the start of the year to about $20,000. All in under 12 months.
Trump said to Mnuchin in May 2018, “Don’t be a trade negotiator.”
Instead, he insisted that he go after Bitcoin.
At the same time, Facebook is preparing to reveal its BTC-inspired crypto, Libra. And this became a reason for Trump to tweet his opposition to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies last year. He marked them as unregulated crypto assets based on thin air.
Plaid Lawsuit
Meanwhile, Plaid received a new class-action lawsuit complaint, with more plaintiffs alleging that the firm violated users’ data privacy.
The latest complaint filed on behalf of four new plaintiffs alleged that Plaid – bought by Visa for $5.3 billion – compiled information on more than 200 million distinct financial accounts who use services like Venmo, Coinbase, Square’s Cash App and Stripe.
In the complaint, Plaid acquired direct and full access to consumers’ personal financial banking information for its commercial purposes. And this is completely unrelated to the consumers’ use of the apps.
It explained, “Plaid exploits its ill-gotten information in a variety of ways, including marketing the data to its app customers, analyzing the data to derive insights into consumer behavior, and most recently, selling its collection of data to Visa as part of a multi-billion dollar acquisition.”
Based on the complaint, Plaid has been unfairly benefitting from the personal information of millions of Americans and wrongfully intruded on their private financial affairs.
Aside from that, this is the second class action complaint against Plaid. The first one was on June 25, alleging Plaid was data plumbing famous services such as Venmo, Stripe, Cash App, and Robinhood.
On the other hand, Plaid has denied the accusations and noted that it never sold user data.
