Will Josh Riley Join In Cryptocurrency Corruption Next Week?
The U.S. House of Representatives is not in session this week. A few members are showing up on the floor of Congress for a few minutes, just to go through the formalities of a workday, but there’s no real business getting done. So, there’s not much to report on the legislative activities of Congressman Josh Riley this week.
However, there is a bill that is scheduled to come up for a vote next week that every resident of New York’s 19th congressional district ought to be watching very closely.
The legislation is H. R. 1664, the Deploying American Blockchains Act of 2025.
The name of this bill doesn’t sound very interesting, but the politics of this legislation get to the heart of the fascism that is taking over the United States of America. Next week, Congressman Josh Riley will either vote yes or vote no on H.R. 1664, and his vote will tell us whether he can be trusted to stand up to fascism, or whether he has decided to collaborate with Donald Trump.
I’m going to need to explain what this legislation is about, and that will take a little bit of time. I promise that this discussion will come back to Josh Riley, and to the non-technical, non-financial political issues that you care about.
About Blockchain
If you don’t pay attention to the world of financial scams, you might think that a blockchain is part of a truck’s engine, or something like that. Actually, blockchain is a kind of computer code that is used mostly to set up and maintain cryptocurrency schemes.
People who are heavily invested in cryptocurrencies like to make blockchain technology sound complicated and sophisticated, but really, the concept is fairly simple. A blockchain is a kind of financial ledger - a system for keeping track of transfers of financial value. Blockchain ledgers differ from the ledgers of traditional finance in that they involve a huge amount of redundant work, requiring massive amounts of electricity. That’s because, unlike traditional financial ledgers, blockchain ledgers have to be copied and continually updated and verified by each and every person who participates in the system.
In blockchain systems, each participant in the system holds a piece of the collective totality of information. These little pieces of information are the blocks. Once a block of information is added to a blockchain system, it cannot be changed unless everyone on the system agrees to change it. That means that mistakes and fraud within a blockchain system are extremely difficult to deal with, making blockchain systems more vulnerable to scam artists than traditional information systems.
Cryptocurrency is the application of blockchain information structures to the realm of financial transactions. Really, it’s the only socially significant application of blockchain that exists, not just of the security vulnerabilities inherent to blockchain, but also because blockchain requires a huge amount of energy, and is clumsy to use.
One result of blockchain’s structure of massive redundancy is that it operates at a painfully slow speed. Bitcoin is capable of processing transactions at the snail’s pace of one fifth of one percent of the speed that’s typical for credit card companies.
Blockchain is not a new or innovative digital technology. Blockchain was invented by cryptographer David Chaum in 1982. For a technological reference point, in 1982, people were watching movies at home using cartridges of magnetic tape that people had to physically rewind every time they wanted to watch the movie again. Blockchain is not at all cutting edge.
So, why would anyone want to use blockchain? If you are a criminal or a corrupt politician, the blockchain technology of cryptocurrency has one very useful advantage: It operates in a shadowy zone outside of America’s system of finance law. Cryptocurrency lobbyists have been able to prevent government agencies from regulating cryptocurrencies. So, the laws that keep standard financial services relatively safe for consumers just don’t apply to cryptocurrency. Because of this strange legal exclusion, cryptocurrencies are rife with scams and frauds, and the government is prevented from even investigating, much less prosecuting, most of the grift. The creation of a shadow economy in which criminal activity can remain hidden is the actual purpose of cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts don’t use blockchain because it’s technically superior. They use blockchain because its activities are technically set apart from securities trading jurisdictions.
That’s not what cryptocurrency lobbyists will tell you, of course. Cryptocurrency lobbyists will tell you that cryptocurrency exists to liberate people from centralized government control. If you think about it, though, "liberation from centralized government control” is really just a euphemism for crime.
The crimes of blockchain are not victimless. Most of the financial fraud that takes place through the blockchain of cryptocurrency victimizes people over the age of 60, people who are cheated out of their life savings just as they’re about to retire. If you want to learn more about the victims of cryptocurrency crimes, I suggest reading through a recent update from Molly White, who summarizes the victim impact statements made during the trial of cryptocurrency CEO Alex Mashinsky.
Alex Mashinsky was prosecuted for defrauding investors working through his crypto trading company Celsius while Joe Biden was President. President Biden directed the Department of Justice to apply standard securities law to cryptocurrency businesses, but Donald Trump is doing the opposite, working with Congress to dismantle the few regulations that apply to cryptocurrencies and directing the Justice Department to shut down investigations into cryptocurrency businesses.
Who benefits from cryptocurrency? Certainly not the people of New York’s 19th congressional district.
Josh Riley likes to talk about the people of New York’s 19th congressional district as “folks”. I was born and grew up in small towns in Upstate New York, so I know a lot about the “folks” who live in this district. There are a lot of different sorts of people who live here, actually, but there’s one thing that almost all of them in common: They are not hungry for cryptocurrency.
When I went door to door canvassing for Josh Riley’s campaign last year, I talked with a lot of people about who they wanted to vote for and why. There was not one single person I talked to, whether they supported Riley or Marc Molinaro, who said that they wanted to elect a member of Congress who would promote blockchain technology or cryptocurrency. Blockchain and cryptocurrency is simply not a priority for the “folks” who live around here.
Maybe it’s different in San Francisco, or Seattle, but I’ll bet that most congressional districts are like ours. Most Americans don’t have any interest in seeing the US federal government promote cryptocurrency and other blockchain schemes. So why is the US House of Representatives going to vote on legislation to promote blockchain? The answer isn’t pretty, but it’s time to look at what this legislation would do.
About H.R. 1664, the Deploying American Blockchains Act of 2025
H.R. 1664 would create a new federal government project that would promote blockchain technology, standardize the rules by which blockchain technologies operate, and instal blockchain systems in all government agencies. Given the slow operating speed of blockchain systems, along with the massive information storage and energy use that they require, this federal blockchain project would simultaneously cost a fortune and reduce government effectiveness. Senior citizens wouldn’t get their social security checks on time, veterans wouldn’t get the services that they need, and disaster response teams would struggle to get out of the gate in response to hurricanes and wildfires.
Of course, the federal agencies that provide such critical community services are already being defunded and dismantled. Could it be that the plan to implement blockchain technology across the federal government is part of the fascist plan to destroy American government from within?
In addition to the clunky-by-design blockchain sabotage of the federal government, there’s the matter of the person that H.R. 1664 would place in the position of supervising national blockchain policy: The Secretary of Commerce.
The current Secretary of Commerce is Howard Lutnick. Before he was appointed to lead the Commerce Department, Howard Lutnick was a longtime cryptocurrency advocate. Lutnick didn’t just advocate for balanced regulation of cryptocurrency. He pushed to remove absolutely all legal restrictions on cryptocurrency trading, “without exception and without limitation”.
As CEO of Wall Street investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald, Lutnick and his organization became heavily invested in cryptocurrency. Although Lutnick officially stepped down from his position at Cantor Fitzgerald, he arranged for his son, Brandon Lutnick to take his place. Brandon Lutnick is finalizing a cryptocurrency partnership between Cantor Fitzgerald and cryptocurrency companies SoftBank, Tether and Bitfinex, each of which has been implicated in illegal financial activities. This partnership has an estimated value of three billion dollars, and is designed to profit from deregulation of cryptocurrency by Howard Lutnick, in his capacity as blockchain czar, established through H. R. 1664, the Deploying American Blockchains Act of 2025.
H.R. 1664 promotes blatant corruption, and helps make cryptocurrency the medium through which corruption takes place.
An example of the open corruption that’s taking place through cryptocurrency was revealed yesterday by Bloomberg News, which reported that Donald Trump has created a bribery competition using his $Trump memecoin, which is hosted on the Solana blockchain platform. The 220 people who buy the largest amount of his memecoin will win the chance to have dinner with Trump, and to take a special private tour through the White House with Trump. Trump has even created a public leaderboard, so that people trying to bribe him can see how their bribes size up against the bribes of others, creating a bidding process that drives the price of corrupt contact with Donald Trump higher and higher.
Every member of Congress, including Josh Riley, knows that this kind of bribery is taking place. Politicians who are seeking to protect blockchain from regulation are, in effect, working to promote an oligarchic system of government in which government officials represent wealthy donors, rather than the electorate.
The core language from the Deploying American Blockchains Act of 2025 can be read below:
“The Secretary shall serve as the principal advisor to the President for policy pertaining to the deployment, use, application, and competitiveness of blockchain technology or other distributed ledger technology, applications built on blockchain technology or other distributed ledger technology, tokens, and tokenization, including by:
developing policies and recommendations on issues and risks related to the deployment, use, application, and competitiveness of blockchain technology or other distributed ledger technology, applications built on blockchain technology or other distributed ledger technology, tokens, and tokenization, including the issues of decentralized identity, cybersecurity, key storage and security systems, artificial intelligence, fraud reduction, regulatory compliance, e-commerce, health care applications, and supply chain resiliency
supporting and promoting the stability, maintenance, improvement, and security of blockchain technology or other distributed ledger technology or other distributed ledger technology, applications built on blockchain technology or other distributed ledger technology, tokens, and tokenization
helping to promote the leadership of the United States with respect to the deployment, use, application, and competitiveness of blockchain technology or other distributed ledger technology, applications built on blockchain technology or other distributed ledger technology, tokens, and tokenization through the establishment of a Blockchain Deployment Program in the Department of Commerce
promoting the national security and economic security of the United States with respect to blockchain technology or other distributed ledger technology, applications built on blockchain technology or other distributed ledger technology, tokens, and tokenization”
The legislation calls for the creation of “advisory committees to support the adoption of blockchain technology or other distributed ledger technology, applications built on blockchain technology or other distributed ledger technology, tokens, and tokenization.” These committees will feature “nongovernmental stakeholders, including blockchain technology or other distributed ledger technology infrastructure operators, suppliers, service providers, and vendors” as well as “developers and organizations supporting the advancement and deployment of public blockchain technology or other distributed ledger technology”.
It’s clear that both from the side of the government and from commercial representatives, these advisory committees will be dominated by cryptocurrency advocates who are determined to prevent the government from engaging in any meaningful regulation of cryptocurrency or other ethically-suspect blockchain projects.
Where Will Josh Riley Stand On This Blockchain Nonsense?
H.R. 1664 will be up for a vote by the full US House of Representatives next week. We can’t know for sure how Congressman Josh Riley intends to vote on this legislation, but the signs are not good.
For one thing, last month Josh Riley voted for legislation that gave a special loophole to cryptocurrency traders, enabling them to avoid making the same income reports that Wall Street firms are required to file. Josh Riley went against a responsible regulation crafted over years of work, allowing a variety of citizens, not just wealthy blockchain insiders, to have a voice in shaping the rule.
Even more concerning is the confidence with which cryptocurrency lobbyists predict that Josh Riley will vote for the economic interests of big crypto traders. Recently, Josh Riley filled out a form for a cryptocurrency lobbyist organization called Stand With Crypto. Given his answers, Stand With Crypto lists Congressman Riley as someone who’s on their side, giving him a grade of A as a solid supporter of the cryptocurrency racket.
An analysis of Josh Riley’s responses to the crypto lobbyists’ questions is below.
Josh Riley gets an A grade from cryptocurrency lobbyists
for supporting their agenda of political corruption.
Is that what you want your member of Congress to be working on?
In his responses to the Stands With Crypto questionnaire, U.S. Representative Josh Riley agreed with the following policy positions:
Blockchain technology and digital assets, including cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, will play a major role in the next wave of technological innovation globally
The American cryptocurrency and digital asset industry is driving economic growth and supporting millions of jobs across the country
US competitiveness and American national security are at risk if the digital asset industry is pushed overseas
It is important for the United States to modernize the regulatory environment for crypto and digital assets to ensure proper consumer protection while also fostering responsible innovation
Josh Riley also made a commitment to Stands With Crypto to vote in favor of deregulation of cryptocurrency, supporting specific pieces of legislation that were written by cryptocurrency lobbyists.
Why would Josh Riley make that commitment to a group of lobbyists working for an economically-powerful interest group primarily associated with political corruption?
Let’s consider the policy statements above, positions that Josh Riley agreed to support.
Is Blockchain playing a major role in the next wave of global technological innovation?
No. For more than two decades, proponents of the blockchain model have been saying that blockchain models will be part of the next big technological innovation. This promise has never been fulfilled. Blockchain is an old technological model now, and it’s been relegated to the margins of digital culture.
Most recently, proponents of blockchain technology made a big push for publicity in 2021, claiming that a new version of the Internet called Web3 or the metaverse, integrating blockchain structures with virtual reality was about to emerge. It never happened. Blockchain was a bust, too unwieldy and irrelevant to what people actually use digital technology for to go anywhere.
Is the American cryptocurrency and digital asset industry driving economic growth and supporting millions of jobs across the USA?
No.
First of all, cryptocurrencies and digital asset businesses are not part of an industry. They don’t produce anything of value. They are empty securities that do not represent any practical benefit to society.
Secondly, cryptocurrency and digital asset schemes have not created millions of jobs in the United States. Bitcoin is by far the largest cryptocurrency in existence, but there are few jobs that have any relationship to Bitcoin at all. Two months ago, cryptocurrency enthusiasts at Cryptonomist and Cointelgraph asserted that Bitcoin has created only 31,000 jobs - and most of those jobs were “indirect”, meaning that they aren’t even actually jobs that are related to Bitcoin. What’s more, Cryptonomist and Cointelgraph are biased sources created by cryptocurrency owners in order to prop up the market for cryptocurrency securities, so they consistently exaggerate the strength of cryptocurrency.
There is no reliable evidence that cryptocurrency and digital asset companies have created anything close to millions of jobs.
What about the idea that economic growth is being driven by cryptocurrencies? There is no evidence to support this broad claim.
In some years, there is growth in the value of cryptocurrency securities, but in other years, there are massive losses of value. Cryptocurrency has proven to be a wildly volatile financial asset. What’s more, cryptocurrencies are mostly an abstraction, disconnected from the rest of the economy due to the technical difficulty and high expense of selling cryptocurrency in exchange for units of economic value that can be used in the real world.
It would be ridiculous to say that nobody makes money from cryptocurrencies, but it is a fact that very few people make most of the gains, and a huge number of people have lost a lot of money through cryptocurrency market manipulation and other blockchain scams.
When there are gains in cryptocurrency markets, a small number of people take the majority of the gains. According to a Wall Street Journal analysis, the most wealthy one tenth of one percent of all Bitcoin holders own almost 30 percent of Bitcoin value. Blockchain advocates claim that cryptocurrency and other blockchain applications will decentralize power, but in practice, blockchain projects operate as tools to centralize power.
There is evidence that cryptocurrency technologies have a substantial negative economic impact upon the larger economy. An analysis by the Centre for Economic Policy Research found that Bitcoin mining operations in Upstate New York caused small businesses to lose $92 million, and local households to lose $204 million every year because of the increased cost of electricity.
There are many other costs associated with cryptocurrency schemes. Here in Tompkins County, we are forced to breathe in air pollution created by a bitcoin mining operation that burns fossil fuels upwind from us, on the shore of Seneca Lake. Unlike actual mining, which creates a tangible economic resource, bitcoin mining creates only abstract wealth for its investors. Bitcoin mining involves running massive numbers of high-powered computers, day and night, in order to solve mathematical problems unrelated to the real world, just to prop up a cryptocurrency market that is inefficient by design. Breathing in the exhaust from the fossil fuels burned to power those computers increases everyone’s risk here of serious, even deadly, medical conditions, which is a further drain on the economy.
Will American economic competitiveness and national security be at risk if digital asset companies choose to go overseas?
No. Blockchain in general and cryptocurrency play no significant role in enabling American economic competitiveness. In fact, with the amount of waste and fraud in the world of blockchain technologies, the USA would almost certainly be better off economically if cryptocurrencies and other blockchain schemes left the United States entirely.
Blockchain and cryptocurrencies have nothing to do with national security. They just don’t. It’s bizarre that Josh Riley would think that there is some kind connection between America’s national security and digital asset schemes.
Is it important for the United States to modernize regulations of cryptocurrency and other digital assets to ensure consumer protections and responsible innovation?
Yes, it is important to protect consumers from the abuses of cryptocurrency and digital asset schemes. Unfortunately, Stand With Crypto promotes deregulation and the reduction of consumer protections.
When Stand With Crypto and other groups say that they want to “modernize regulations”, what they mean is that they want to weaken or eliminate regulations of blockchain, cryptocurrency, and other digital assets.
Innovation in blockchain technology has consistently been socially irresponsible. It has resulted in massive pollution of air and water, increases in energy costs, political corruption, the concentration of wealth, the development of international criminal networks, and the growth of fascism.
The deregulatory agenda of Stand With Crypto would not solve these problems. It would make these problems worse.
Blockchain and cryptocurrencies are a thorough disaster. They don’t achieve anything practical for America, serving as little more than conduits for corruption and fraud. There is no reason that Congressman Josh Riley should be lifting a finger to help crypto insiders.
This Issue Is Not Complex
Let’s sum up what’s going on with this legislation:
Blockchain is not innovative. It’s an old technology that doesn’t work well, because it’s purposefully inefficient.
The people who promote cryptocurrencies and other blockchains do so because they’re looking for ways to make money for themselves in an unregulated securities market where criminals thrive and a lot of people get hurt.
H.R. 1664 will place a cryptocurrency insider in charge of a process to remove all meaningful consumer protections over blockchain, enriching his family with a three billion dollar deal.
Cryptocurrency is the medium through which bribes to corrupt officials in Donald Trump’s fascist government are being paid. If you oppose fascism, you need to oppose cryptocurrency.
Luckily, it’s not too late to have your voice be heard. There are still a few days before the vote on H. R. 1664, the Deploying American Blockchains Act of 2025.
Please, call the number below and tell the person who answers the phone that you want Congressman Riley to vote NO on H.R. 1664.
