Im pleased to cochair this hearing on the present and future impact of Virtual Currency. My friend senator merkel and i appreciate the work senator heller has done and senator kirk will be joining us as well. Were going to do this a little different because its a joint subcommittee hearing i will chair the first panel and the senator will chair the second. The uses of Virtual Currencies have proliferated in recent years. My hope for this hearing is to educate the Senate Members and others and start the education of the public about Virtual Currencies, including the potential and drawbacks. I also hope to explore how regulators are keeping up with this technological innovation to protect consumers. Ive got a full statement here but i actually have to acknowledge that ive been following this development of bit coins for the last two months. I would think im only starting to wrap my head around the potential upside, downside, regulatory issues, Monetary Policy issues, taxation issues, Con
Intelligence director dont report this bag brick lane as the preferred currency. That really the case. Ive got coming up. Leaving colorado should prisoners are being denied the option of labeling their foods as gm free. Talk about this and other invites around the country with or that percentage is also talk about the new documentary html. Omg it later in the saddle. A fan. Its friday to wearing thirty first tried yet been wanting to be easy and carry a boring watching our tv. We began with the new revelation as travelers passing through canadian airports considering going offline. The doc merely by edward snow and was just released by cbc news in canada chile next hit of the electronic spy agency used information from the Free Internet service at a major canadian airports to track the wireless devices of thousands of ordinary online passengers per day even after they left the terminal the operation by the qut sin security establishment canada for cnbc it was revealed in the car points
Lenders. I think thats something that id like to talk a little bit about here today because members of our military have to resort to financing from these predatory lenders all too often. We know military Service Members are three times more likely than civilians to use predatory payday loans that charge exorbitant rates. Thats three times the civilians use. The military families carry 10,000 or more in Credit Card Debt compared to 16 for civilian frames. 10 of military families carry more than 20,000 in debt compared to just 7 of the civilian families, and more than half of military Service Members are not saving for the future and have trouble paying their monthly bills. Thats why this morning, i reintroduced my military savings act which is legislation i previously introduced in the house of representatives, and the bill would promote Savings Rates among military Service Members and decrease their need to turn to predatory payday lenders in times of financial crisis. The bill establ
Terms of youre not truly anonymous. There is an encrypted version of who owns what. So one concern about the, if you will, the reliability of the currency is whether that encryption can actually be broken. So i want to ask that question. There are some very powerful code breakers in the world. And we certainly have cussio discussions about our own u. S. Capability to break codes quite often up here. But the second is weve had this series of reported crimes. One was a Bitcoin Savings and trust which ran a pyramid scheme in bitcoins. We also had the hacking of a Bitcoin Exchange called bit floor. And as it was reported, 24,000 bitcoins were stolen. 2 and we had instawallet, a wallet provider that was hacked and ed. They lost 35,000 bitcoins. These are not small dollar items given the value of the individual coins. But maybe to paint a little bit of a picture for us, how does this all work . If there is a public ledger that is keeping track of who owns what, then how does one actually ste
Anonymity and privacy, and bath there are new laws that are required to end the possibility of anonymity or to address that in some way. I think, you know, as i stated in my comments, we are very focused within our business on having very deep levels of identity verification, we view that as critical. Others within the Digital Currency world, particularly within geographies that dont have the same type of regulatory regimes do not. There are other things we need to be thinking about that could address those issues. I think that arena needs additional and careful consideration. Thank you. I think there is broad consensus among the panel here, i was very heartened to hear the first panels message, and i think we have a lot of consensus, ill pick two issues to give you an answer. First, i was interested in listening to the gentleman from the secret service that said that centralized currencies pose the greatest risk as far as Money Laundering. And bit coin, because of their nature, they w