Former Texas congressman Ron Paul says that if history is any indication, the government could still clamp down hard on the crypto markets.
In a new interview on Kitco News, Paul says that there could be a repeat of 1934 when the Gold Reserve Act prohibited Americans from holding and trading the precious metal, but this time targeting crypto.
“I am influenced a whole lot about history and the gold history and my interest in studying money and some of the principles that Austrian economics teaches about what the nature of money should be, but that doesn’t sway me from arguing the case for those who know about crypto, understand it better than I do that it should be obviously permitted.”
Paul says in general, he’s surprised that many in the crypto industry are adamant about getting regulatory clarity from authorities. He says it’s almost the opposite mentality that gold enthusiasts used to have decades ago.
“About five years ago or something, I was at a conference… Somebody was very interested in regulation. And I thought ‘Wow I’m with a bunch of hardcore libertarians and here we’re going to have a new currency. It’s going to be anonymous and still at the same time be transparent. This is wonderful.’ But the transparency, the argument I heard was…
They sort of threw the question at me because I had been in Congress: ‘How do we get to the right people on the right committee to get it because we need the regulations written because then, we’ll be credible,’ and that still goes on. You know, ‘credible asset,’ ‘SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission),’ ‘SEC report.’
The people who owned gold and have been taught about survival and have gold coins, they’re not looking for a way that the government knows where all your gold is just in case you want to take it again. That’s almost like asking ‘How many guns do you have?’ and ‘Tell us what safe they’re in.'”
The former politician says that while Bitcoin is different from other assets, it appears correlated with the movements of the stock market and traditional assets.
“Bitcoin is unique. It’s different, the markets are different, but I’ve been trying to figure out, is it more like a stock or a bond or a hard asset commodity? Right now, I would say in my looking at the different statistics, it seems to trace stock prices as well as anything else that I know.”
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