The regime really needs bitcoins in order to fund its nuclear weapons program?? U. S. politicians have other reasons to crackdown on cryptocurrencies.
By Stefan Gleason
The dangerous provocations between North Korea and the United States haven’t yet escalated enough to rattle financial markets. The U. S. stock market notched another new record high last week, helping to blunt safe-haven demand for gold and silver.
The North Korea situation is, however, causing political reverberations in the crytpocurrency markets. Following China’s recent crackdown on crytpocurrency exchanges, U. S. officials may be gearing up for a regulatory attack on Bitcoin as part of an economic sanctions package.
Enter Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey (D). In an interview on CNN last Friday, Markey said, “The only answer is to go to final sanctions on the North Koreans… The cryptocurrency Bitcoin, which they are using to supply funding to their economy – all of it should be shut off.”
It’s hard to believe the regime needs bitcoins in order to keep its nuclear weapons program up and running. But U. S. politicians have lots of other reasons to launch a crackdown on the cryptocurrency. Chief among them are bringing home tax revenue and defending the U. S. dollar and banking system from free-market competition.
As with the National Security agency’s backdoors into encrypted smartphones, we may not know the U. S. government’s full technical capacity to track or disable cryptocurrency transactions until it is actually deployed (or leaked).
The U. S. possesses sophisticated cyber warfare capabilities.
