Since leaving the CFTC, Giancarlo has joined the Chamber of Digital Commerce as an advisor and also joined the board of the American Financial Exchange. During his time with the CFTC, Giancarlo called for a lighter regulatory approach when it came to cryptocurrencies.
Now, sitting down with CoinDesk’s Michael Casey, the former chairman is ready to expand the definition of digital currencies in the United States.
Former CFTC Chairman Chris Giancarlo aka «Crypto Dad» sees the current set of financial systems – the older systems associated with the pre-digital age – as hopelessly obsolete. He aims to fix them.
“During my five years at the commission we saw this sort of new wave of the digitization of our world that’s taking place”, he said. “The first wave was the digitization of information, and that’s created the Internet as we know it today. But we’re seeing what some people call the digitization of value, or the or the Internet of value.”
“I’ve been also thinking a lot about how so much of our physical infrastructure – our bridges, our tunnels, our airports – have been allowed to age and decay. They were state of the art in the fifties and sixties. They are well past their sell-by day today”, he said. “So much of our financial infrastructure has also been allowed to age and decay and not been modernized.”
When Currencies Fail: A Primer on the Dollar Crisis in Lebanon
A massive shortage of dollars is instigating economic chaos, including a more than 50% loss of value in the Lebanese pound.
The Lebanese pound has lost at least 50% of its value against the dollar since last year. About 220,000 people have lost their jobs. Food prices are up 58%. An estimated 75% of the population needs assistance of some kind. And over the last two nights, at least a dozen banks have been torched by protesters.
The catalyst? Not coronavirus but a massive dollar shortage destroying an economy that relies on inflows of U.S. dollars to function.
In this episode, NLW breaks down how Lebanon models what it looks like for a currency to fail, and why this likely isn’t the last emerging market currency to experience a similar crisis in the months to come.
What If Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Bought All BTC? Tone Vays Weighs in
Crypto trader and YouTuber, Tone Vays, explained that Amazon’s $140 billion CEO couldn’t buy every Bitcoin in circulation.
What would happen if Bezos tried? «He would drive up the price of Bitcoin to the point where he could no longer afford it,» Vays told Cointelegraph in a message on April 23.
Why couldn’t Bezos buy all the BTC on the market?
On the day of Vays’ comments, all the speculative capital held within Bitcoin gave the asset a total market cap near $137 billion, with each coin priced at approximately $7,500, CoinMarketCap data showed.
In the last 11 years, roughly 18,343,537 BTC have circulated the market. A number of those coins, however, sit in various wallets and platforms with longer term holding in mind. Some early adopters even lost unknown amounts of likely unrecoverable BTC.
Essentially, only a certain amount of BTC is liquid, or immediately tradable, on exchanges and markets. «Bitcoin is a very illiquid asset,» Vays said. If Bezos tried to buy all available BTC, everyone would begin buying up Bitcoin after hearing the news, which would take the asset’s price even higher, Vays explained.
People might even panic?
Continuing his explanation, Vays said the situation might also cause fear in the market. «If he did achieve the purchase of a significant chunk of Bitcoin to rival Satoshi, or even say 25% of all Bitcoin, he could then cause some panic in the market with people thinking he might dump any moment, crashing the price,» Vays explained.
Vays referenced a similar situation seen roughly 40 years ago. Between 1979 and 1980, the Hunt brothers, W. Herbert and Nelson Bunker, attempted to purchase all silver on the market, also called «cornering the market,» an article from Business Insider detailed.
Similar to what Vays believes would happen with BTC, the Hunt brothers’ mass buying resulted in silver’s market value surging from $6 to $50 per ounce, Business Insider said.
«The government stepped in to shut it down,» Vays said of the Hunt’s silver buying caper. «I can also see the government stepping in if an American tried to corner the market,» Vays said of Bitcoin, noting the asset’s mainstream prevalence.
Philip Salter, Genesis Mining’s head of mining operations, also gave his opinion on the same hypothetical scenario on April 22.
