US Treasury's Crypto-Plan Unveiled
America’s Surveillance State Core Democratic Values
The US Treasury Department released a fact sheet this week outlining a framework for the United States’ role in international cryptocurrency regulation. The stated intention of this framework is to ensure that “America's core democratic values are respected,” and they listed their objectives as follows:
Protect consumers, investors, and businesses in the United States and globally by promoting technology and regulatory standards that reflect U.S. values;
Protect U.S. and global financial stability and mitigate systemic risk;
Mitigate illicit finance and national security risks posed by misuse of digital assets and counter and respond to efforts by foreign adversaries to drive standards and promote their protocols;
Reinforce U.S. leadership in the global financial system and in technological and economic competitiveness, including through the responsible development of payment innovations and digital assets and by advancing technology and regulatory standards that align with U.S. values;
Promote access to safe and affordable financial services; and
Support technological advances that promote responsible development and use of digital assets by advancing research and relationships that increase shared learning.
It’s kind of a nothing-document that basically says “we aim to control cryptocurrency standards for the world”. It also discusses a path toward the development of an official CBDC:
“The United States must continue to work with international partners on standards for the development of digital payment architectures and CBDCs (central bank digital currencies) to reduce payment inefficiencies and ensure that any new payment systems are consistent with U.S. values and legal requirements.”
The plan is to continue engagements with G7 and G20, the Financial Stability Board(FSB), the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) amongst others.
Last week the EU voted to approve mandatory KYC on all transactions between hosted crypto wallets, so it’s clear which direction “global regulation” is headed in. One might also ask what exactly “regulatory standards that reflect U.S. values” entails, as revealed preference suggests these values center around total surveillance of both the financial and digital landscapes, as well as the curtailing of innovation across those sectors.
I’d rather global standards that reflected the values of Sealand. Or ideally, no global standards set by governments at, and instead we let the market’s own revealed preference manifest (which currently seems to be headed towards increased privacy and decentralization).
If “financial stability” is indeed their main concern, Treasury might be better off moving their focus away from cryptocurrency, and towards the government’s recent decision to shut down the entire economy for over a year and then print obscene amounts of money. Deciding not to do those things could definitely help financial stability going forward. Perhaps someone should tell them.
Crypto Ransom Returned… with Interest!
Netherlands-based Maastricht University is celebrating the successful return of extorted bitcoin from a ransomware attack in 2019. After all of their servers were maliciously encrypted with "Clop"ransomware, a variant of CryptoMix ransomware, the university paid €200,000 in BTC to the attackers to have them decrypted. In 2020, The Dutch Public Prosecution Service (DDPS) was able to track down and seize one of the crypto wallets that received BTC from the hack. At the time it only had €40,000 worth of BTC in it. That BTC has just been returned to the university, and thanks to bitcoin’s appreciation in the last few years, it’s now worth approximately €500,000!
While crypto news today is centered around the bear market and red candles, sometimes it’s helpful to zoom out.
Privacy Corner: Alternatives to Google Docs
Google docs revolutionized real-time collaboration, but there’s a BIG problem with it — your documents aren’t end-to-end encrypted. This means that Google servers can see everything you write. We don’t know what Google is doing with that data, but they’re definitely scanning it and analyzing it.
Luckily there are privacy-focused alternatives that allow real-time collaboration AND are end-to-end encrypted, like Cryptpad and Skiff. Here’s our take:
Cryptpad
Cryptpad is an entire collaborative worksuite that’s all end-to-end encrypted, and it feels very similar to Google Docs. You can create documents, presentations, spreadsheets, forms, whiteboards, slides, etc. They have “CryptDrive” that you can think of like your Google Drive, except without digital vampires sucking up your data.
A great feature of Cryptpad is that you don’t need to give away any personal information in order to create an account. The password you choose is the secret key that encrypts all of your documents.
Note: If you lose your password there is no way for you to recover your data, so store it safely!
You can import various file types into Cryptpad, and formatting is retained really well.
Cryptpad is fully open source, and no readable data leaves your device. Even the support tickets are encrypted!
Skiff
Skiff is a newer product and their product suite is currently limited to just text docs and emails, both of which are end-to-end encrypted. You can import both Word Doc and Google Doc formats directly into Skiff.
One feature that sets them apart is that you can import documents directly from Google Drive by linking your account — Skiff never has access to your Google account, and they don't even know which account you’re signing in with. All encryption of your documents is done client-side in the browser, and then they’re uploaded to Skiff. This is a really neat feature that makes the switching cost of moving from Drive to a more private alternative much easier.
One disclaimer with importing and exporting documents: not all formatting is supported in Skiff, so some of the formatting of your doc like strikethroughs and highlighting won’t currently transfer over.
Skiff doesn’t yet offer an alternative to Google Sheets, but they do offer tables with basic functionality inside their docs. They also support IPFS if you’d prefer your data to be stored in a decentralized way rather than on a big-tech database.
Our team has tried both platforms and were please with the results! If you have alternative products you’d like us to test out, please add them to the comments!
By Will Sandoval, NBTV Associate Producer, and Naomi Brockwell.