Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren Shares Cryptocurrency Negativity

Senators and political figures in the United States start to build their opinions about virtual currencies and blockchain technology. This time, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, has shown that it has a negative point of view regarding cryptocurrencies. These comments have been made during the Senate Banking Committee hearing the last week.

She said that virtual currencies were ‘easy to steal’ and that several smaller investors were being scammed by companies with fake Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). This is something similar to what Nouriel Roubini, the recognized economist, says about virtual currencies and the crypto space.

Nouriel Roubini became famous when he predicted the global financial crisis that took place in 2008 and affected the whole world. Although Roubini said that Bitcoin was not attacked yet, he said that crypto exchanges have already been affected by attacks and hackers. In this way, several users lost their funds. At the same time, he said that Bitcoin mining activities take place in countries that are not transparent including Belarus, China and Russia.

Despite the negative comments of these two figures, there are some respected individuals that are in favour of virtual currencies and see several positive points about them. The Banking Committee chair, Mike Crapo, acknowledged that blockchain can improve certain areas of the financial industry. For example, it is possible to enhance payments and settlement and identity management as well.

This does not mean that there are no critics to make about virtual currencies. For example, he has also said that there were several ‘pump and dump’ schemes that have affected the virtual currency market in the last years.

Elizabeth Warrenhas also said in 201 that she was worried about families investing in cryptocurrencies and being economically hurt because of the volatility in the market.

At the hearing was present Peter Van Valkenburgh, research centre chief at Coincenter. He has been defending cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. For example, he said that distributed ledger technology could be as prosperous as the Internet was and that Clinton was able to see that allowing it to grow.

Furthermore, he has also said that cryptocurrencies are going to be improved with new scaling solutions and mechanisms.

It is clear that blockchain technology and virtual currencies have been growing all over the world. However, governments are still trying to understand how they work and how to better regulate them to avoid the negative impact of them.