Human Rights Foundation exec raises concern against “Crypto-Currency Act of 2020″

• Bitcoin supporter Alex Gladstein believes the Crypto-Currency Act 2020 is an attack on financial privacy.
• He said that any legislation that forces businesses to spy on or micro monitor their customers are violating financial privacy.

The chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation, Alex Gladstein, has criticized the Crypto-Currency Act of 2020. He believes it is an attack on financial privacy. Gladstein, a well-known Bitcoin supporter, cited a section of the bill and said that any legislation forcing businesses to spy on, deanonymize or micro-monitor customers is violating the financial privacy that is needed to protect democratic freedom. 

Gladstein said:

If you buy any cryptocurrency at a regulated exchange, do you want that company to be giving up your information (NAME bought X amount of Y on withdrew on Z day) to the government without a warrant? Without any probable cause?

He believes that as long as Bitcoin exists, people will be able to use it as a global safety net against authoritarian governments. 

According to an earlier FXStreet report, Paul Gosar (R-AZ) introduced an updated version of the Crypto-Currency Act of 2020, which is designed to legitimize digital assets by classifying them into three categories and assigning a sole regulator for each of these segments. The three industry regulators include the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the Secretary of the Treasury via the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

As per a Bloomberg report, two of the three regulators mentioned above aren’t meant to regulate currencies, namely – the CFTC, which regulates derivatives trading and not the trading of commodities themselves, and FinCEN, which regulates financial institutions, not currencies or assets.

Legal analyst Robert Kim stated:

The draft bill’s superficially neat categories of crypto-assets and superficially neat division of regulatory authority over them create new problems regarding boundaries, however, making them likely to sow further confusion rather than establish clarity.