As the regulatory pressure on the cryptocurrency industry grows, Joe Rogan has given his own two cents on the newly proposed Restrict Act, which some criticize as granting the government absolute power and control of digital rights, as well as endangering privacy and limiting the flow of information, with Rogan arguing it could affect Elon Musk and his tweets on crypto.
Indeed, Rogan pointed out several issues regarding Senator Mark Warner’s Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act (‘RESTRICT’), particularly the fact that it is seemingly open to interpretation, as he was joined by comedians Big Jay Oakerson and Ari Shaffir in a Joe Rogan Experience podcast episode streamed on April 5.
Specifically, he quoted the White House describing the Restrict Act as “a systematic framework for addressing technology-based threats to the security and safety of Americans,” as well as the legislation’s text, which authorizes the Commerce Secretary to review transactions by certain foreign entities who offer “information and communications technologies products or services” (ICTS).
Impact on digital economy
In particular, Rogan focused on the part of the legislation that places “impact to the country’s critical infrastructure and digital economy” (among other things) under “undue and unacceptable” risks to the national security of the United States and its citizens, prohibiting such transactions, which he considered was unclear.
“[It’s] so open to interpretation, like (…) the ‘impact to the country’s critical infrastructure and the digital economy’ – that’s easy to do, you can impact it, what if you impact it in a positive way? And ‘digital economy,’ how do they, what have you done, do you promote a certain coin and it blows up? Then you just impacted the digital economy.”
As an example, he used the recent situation in which the Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) and Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) CEO Elon Musk changed the Twitter logo to a Dogecoin (DOGE) image, after which the price of Dogecoin reacted by skyrocketing 22% in a matter of minutes (leading to accusations of intentional pumping):
“If Elon posts a Dogecoin image, immediately Dogecoin goes up – doesn’t that impact the digital economy? So what does that mean? What if he says the crypto is garbage because he believes it – well, doesn’t that impact the digital economy?”
Moreover, Rogan took issue with the term “digital economy,” which doesn’t specify whether “they [are] talking about the digital economy that exists now or are they talking about a centralized digital currency, which is what China does or what they want to do,” referring to the Chinese central bank digital currency (CBDC), the digital yuan (e-CNY) system, and similar efforts in the US.
Watch the entire video below:
