Is privacy crypto’s last stand? Industry experts on the legal battles ahead

With financial surveillance expanding and global regulators eyeing stricter controls, crypto advocates are warning that the fight for digital privacy is entering a critical phase. On the latest episode of The Clear Crypto Podcast, Peter Van Valkenburgh, executive director of Coin Center, described the current moment as a tipping point.

Crypto in politics

“The stakes have just gotten higher in D.C., not necessarily uniformly better,” he said, pointing to a political climate where crypto has become both more mainstream and more polarizing. 

“You’ve got maybe more partisan discussions, more boosters for the tech that are sometimes maybe foolishly boosting things that they shouldn't be boosting, and more detractors from the tech who think that it's nothing but scams and corruption and therefore needs to be outlawed.”

Founded in 2014, Coin Center has long served as an independent voice in crypto policy circles. At that time, lawmakers were beginning to have questions about Bitcoin. 

“There’s no corporation you can call up that is Bitcoin, that can explain the good answers to you that are unbiased and untarnished.”

“So Coin Center was stood up… for the purpose of being a trusted voice to explain this to members of Congress who are thinking about making laws.”

Regulation limitations

He emphasized the organization’s narrow mission: defending the rights of developers and users to publish code and run decentralized networks. 

“You should regulate people who are trusted in this space… but you should also not overregulate people who are just developing the technology and allowing people to make peer-to-peer transactions.”

Those transactions, he warned, are increasingly at risk from global financial surveillance regimes. “When the US Treasury says you need to collect all this information about your customers... it will often also go to an international organization like the Financial Action Task Force... and say every other country needs to collect all this private information,” he said.

Related: US CLARITY bill could allow Tesla and Meta to evade SEC rules — Senator Warren

Van Valkenburgh also highlighted the importance of privacy-enhancing technologies like zero-knowledge proofs. “We have to build them with zero knowledge built in,” he said, warning that without change, “identity will become useless because we’ll never know if we’re dealing with a real person or a bot who just purchased [your] driver’s license on a dark market.”

For Van Valkenburgh, privacy is more than a technical challenge; it’s a cultural one. 

“Crypto… is our best hope of building a new internet and a new way of interacting online that’s more personal and less depersonalized.”

To hear the complete conversation on the Clear Crypto Podcast, listen to the full episode on Cointelegraph’s Podcasts page, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don’t forget to check out Cointelegraph’s full lineup of other shows! 

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