According to US Senator Elizabeth Warren, crypto advocates’ claim that cryptocurrency is a path to financial inclusion is untrue. She said that Bitcoin ownership is just concentrated in just the top 1% and added that they need to come up with real solutions that can help make the financial system work for everyone and not just for those who are wealthy. She made tweets about bitcoin, crypto, and financial inclusion on Tuesday. She says that as opposed to dollars, bitcoin is only under the ownership of the top 1%, which means it is not about financial inclusion.
She commented in response to an article posted in the Wall Street Journal, which claimed that the top 1% holders of bitcoin are controlling a greater share of the digital currency, as opposed to what most affluent American households control in dollars. The author had cited a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research and said that 5 million bitcoins were spread across the top 10,000 bitcoin accounts, which is valued at almost $232 billion. A number of Twitter users responded to the tweet of the US Senator. One user told the Massachusetts senator that it wasn’t true because the fixed bitcoin supply would make ownership less concentrated over time with the creation of value, usage, and adoption.
The user said that this was the only way to fix the money printing problem without putting an invisible tax on average citizens. Another tweet called the senator’s argument flawed and said that she did not have any understanding of bitcoin or cryptocurrency. The user said that bitcoin was not the only crypto in the market, as there is an entire industry that is flourishing. Some people went as far as reminding the senator that crypto is for everyone because it is decentralized, which means it is not just for the rich.
Some also questioned the claims that the Wall Street Journal article had made. A number of people used terms like ‘ignorant’ and ‘manipulative’ for the senator and emphasized that she needs to educate herself about cryptocurrencies. Recently, the senator had called on regulatory authorities to ‘clamp down’ on decentralized finance platforms, along with stablecoins before it is too late. She had even used the adjective ‘dangerous’ to define DeFi platforms. She had also urged Janet Yellen, the Secretary of the US Treasury in July, to quickly adopt a policy that could be used for mitigating crypto risks.
Back in September, she had also urged the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to focus on the problem of high transaction fees as well as outages that happen on crypto exchanges. Even then, she had stated that cryptocurrency was not the way to achieve financial inclusion. She is certainly not the only one who holds this opinion about bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general. Currently, there is a great deal of debate happening about cryptocurrency and its regulation, as it is becoming apparent that digital currencies will be a part of the financial system and require regulation.