Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Schwarzenbber, your host. On today's show, regulating Bitcoin and other virtual currencies. Joining me to discuss this is Peter Van Valkenberg, Director of Research at Coin Center. Peter, thank you for joining me.

Thanks for having me, Evan. So before we get into the show, Peter, I want to point out that you

used to work at Tech Freedom, similar to other guests that have come on the podcast. And why did

you leave this wonderful place? It's around the time they hired you, actually. So no, no. In all seriousness, Jerry Brito, who's the executive director of Coin Center, approached me around that time and said, hey, would you like to be director of research at a Bitcoin think tank? And I said, no such thing exists. And that's crazy. But how could I not do that? That's

awesome. So it turned out to be a real thing. And now we've been around for about a year and a half.

So you're saying it wasn't because I was hired or because you got sick of Barron.

It's correlation, causation, you know. That's tough to say. Well, anyway, tell us about your new outfit.

What is CoinCenter?

So, CoinCenter is a nonprofit research and advocacy center that's focused specifically on the public policy issues that face cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

So you can think of us as sort of similar to what, say, you at Tech

Freedom or EFF or the Center for Democracy and Technology, similar to what you guys do,

but with a very narrow focus as opposed to a broad-based technology and internet policy focus,

and it's specifically on cryptocurrencies.

So you focus on cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, and what type of, what are you advocating for?

Why do we need a think tank that is solely focused on virtual currency? Sure, sure.

I think maybe in 1995 you would have had similar questions when the EFF was getting started. Why do we need a

nonprofit that isn't a trade association for a big software company or a suite of software

companies? Or why do we need a nonprofit advocacy group when they have lobbyists, when they have other

things? And the reality is that what we're dealing with is open technologies

when we're dealing with the Internet. We're dealing with standards and systems that are basically

peer-to-peer. They may be hub and spoke, but at the end of the day, the technologies that power

them are open source. They don't have a single constituent to fund a large-scale regulatory policy effort.

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