 How will the Earnit Act Senate Bill 3398 affect cryptocurrency? asks Paul. In case you didn't know it, in the background of giving a $4 trillion bailout to large corporations at our expense, and then dropping some little crumbs down for us little people, the Senate has had time to debate and it's close to passing other fantastic bills such as the Earnit Act, which as its name hints has nothing to do with earning it and all to do with stopping and to end encryption. And the way it does that is by weakening the protections offered under the DMCA, the Digital Millennial Copyright Act and I believe it's titled 230 of the DMCA, which actually provides a safe haven for companies that follow the DMCA to be protected from liability for things that their users do on their platforms. This is a fundamental pillar of the DMCA, which is that if companies have measures in place to protect copyright holders, to take down offensive material, by offensive I mean illegal material that violates somebody's intellectual property or some other law, then they are protected from liability for those acts. And so therefore that's a fundamental column of the DMCA and it gives platform companies, especially large content companies, the freedom to be able to post content from their users without having to face liability for it. Now imagine if Facebook was liable for everything its users published, basically it wouldn't exist. What the Earnit Act does is it uses that to drive a Trojan horse right through the DMCA and say that if companies use end-to-end encrypted systems that do not have backdoors for law enforcement, they no longer are protected from liability for things posted by their users. Now this Earnit Act could be called Fuck You Zuckerberg, you're going to give us backdoors because that's effectively what it is. This is a very, very directed law that affects the largest content providers. It's not just Zuckerberg of course, but certainly Facebook has the most to lose from this, especially because of one application that they offer which is called WhatsApp. And WhatsApp is used by billions of people around the world to protect their communication from dictators all around the world and of course we love dictators, so why not help them out? So that's what the Earnit Act is doing. It's going to hurt Google with the YouTube platform. It's going to hurt a lot of centralized platforms and what is the impact it's going to have on Bitcoin? Well, I think one of the impacts it's going to have is that companies that engage in transactions that offer zero knowledge transactions may be affected by this because they will not be able to shield themselves for the liability of users transmitting transactions on their platforms if they do not have backdoors for law enforcement. This may cause some difficulty for trusted third party companies in crypto, which means that if a company is centralized and controls transactions on behalf of its users, then it may be liable, which will arguably encourage more decentralization. So if a company has no control over its users transactions, then this doesn't really apply. Again, I think these types of regulations are really aimed at centralized organizations and platforms and in the long term, undermining end-to-end encryption and undermining kind of these freedoms that we consider necessary to encourage free speech and expression and encourage the growth of independent media and platforms, undermining those really pushes the need for decentralized platforms. It's a terrible law. It's an absolutely atrocious law. It's probably going to pass. I mean, who are we kidding? I have very little hope in our political and economic system at this point, but fortunately, all it's going to do is undermine centralized organizations.