The CHIPS Act could drive an American blockchain revolution

Adelle Nazarian, executive director of the American Blockchain PAC, whose advisory board is chaired by blockchain co-inventor Dr. W. Scott Stornetta, and Alex Allaire, co-founder and executive director of the American Blockchain Initiative, recently published a roadmap for Congressional blockchain regulation in National interest.

Our two organizations have curated ten bills among the best, most consequential and politically most palatable. Soon there will be more.

Lots of smart people on the Hill and in the executive branch are crafting legislation worthy of President Joe Biden’s landmark Executive Order #14067: Ensuring the Responsible Development of Digital Assets. This executive order is the most consistent presidential pronouncements on technology policy since President John F. Kennedy sent the United States to the moon with his 1962 Rice University speech on September 12, 1962.

Biden’s executive order created a national framework that fully respected, for the first time, the “responsible development” of digital assets like the blockchain.

The first policy recommendation on our initial list:

Congress should provide funding for blockchain research and development on the scale of the National Quantum Initiative. In October 2019, Chinese President Xi Jinping, the leader of America’s main rival, threw down the gauntlet. “It is necessary to strengthen basic research, improve the original innovation ability, and strive to let China take the leading position in the emerging field of blockchain, occupy the innovation heights, and gain new industrial advantages,” Xi declared. America must rise to this challenge!

Federal research and development (R&D) will never pass the libertarian purity test. But as one of us noted in a column for Newsmax:

…Per [the eminent Norman] Augustine, a number of studies, including those that won the Robert Solow and Paul Romer Nobel Prizes in economics, show that as much as 85% of long-term growth in the US economy is due to advances in science and technology.

The payoffs from the successes of federal R&D dwarf the costs of the failures. This inconvenient truth is supported by ample evidence, however terrifying to libertarians.

To return to Romer, the proto-provider and creator of the maxim “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” a 1997 article in The cable entitled The Long Boom noted that “research by a few economists, such as Stanford University’s Paul Romer, suggests that fundamentally new technologies generally do not become productive until a generation after their introduction, the time it takes for people to really learn to use them. on new ways.”

This waiting period primarily requires governmental, rather than corporate, initiative. And here it comes!

Last month, in massive bipartisan fashion, the president signed the Chips and Science Act of 2022. This committed the United States, according to CNN, to “investing more than $200 billion over the next five years to help the United States regain a leading position in semiconductor chip production.”

200 billion dollars? Our earlier call to use blockchain on the scale of the National Quantum Initiative—$1.2 billion over the next five years—seems positively, well, libertarian. In retrospect, our proposal called for an unduly modest response to a challenge from America’s number one technological and economic rival, the People’s Republic of China.

However, take heart. The New York Times observed that the law would also “add $200 billion to scientific research, particularly in artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum computing and a number of other technologies.” (Emphasis added.)

If we dedicate even a few percent of $200 billion to blockchain, Beijing will eat America’s dust. America retains a strong edge in innovation. Again, per New York Times: “The road to the ‘global technology summits,’ as Mr. Xi has described China’s ambitions, is decidedly uphill.”

America’s advantage becomes especially vivid with possible breakthroughs for blockchain-as-a-platform via concurrent computing using rholang, an advanced mathematics invented by Gregory Meredith, one of our colleagues.

Let’s take Romer’s dictum, “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” to heart. Let our federal government’s scientific thought leaders allocate 3 or 4 percent of the Chips and Science Act funds to put the United States at the dominant heights of blockchain technology.

Todd White is the founder of American Blockchain PAC where Ralph Benko is a senior advisor.

Image: Reuters.