US Anti-Privacy Crypto Approach Will Aid China’s AI Goals

Coindesk’s Michael Casey asks a question with ominous implications: “If the U.S. government fears China’s progress in artificial intelligence, why is it giving Beijing a treasure trove of highly valuable crypto data with which to train its machine-learning models?”

We know the anti-privacy attitude too many US regulators and legislators take toward crypto is a problem. But who benefits beyond the obvious agencies and central bankers? It’s exactly the nation the US says is the greatest threat –China – where all the publicly available blockchain data will enhance their AI efforts.

I and many others were making the positive case long before the Tornado Cash action that the U.S. and its allies would gain a geopolitical advantage if they allowed the expansion of decentralized, privacy-protecting, open-access crypto protocols.

The idea is that Western society can unleash a “killer app”: the enshrining of individual rights into code, enticing the world’s digitally-mobile citizens to vote with their pocketbooks in favor of Western monetary systems that encourage open-access and privacy over authoritarian control and surveillance. The model would win, we said, because dictatorships and single-party states cannot match it without losing control over their money and thereby sowing the seeds of their own downfall.

Until my conversation with Mohammed, the chief scientist at privacy-protecting Panther Protocol, the failure to embrace that open approach to crypto policy was a major source of my frustration with the United States’ draconian regulation of crypto projects, where users are compelled to identify themselves, comply with “accredited investor” requirements and meet excessive reporting demands from government authorities. All of that activity, I’ve argued, defeats crypto’s decentralization principles and diminishes its potentially vast value to society.

But, sadly, I now have a more ominous take on the problem. It seems we’re not only relinquishing the opportunity to use the “carrot” of privacy to out-compete China, we’re also handing it a “stick” with which to subjugate us and accelerate its march toward AI dominance.

Read the whole piece here.