A second public hearing held by the Australian Senate on the topic of digital currencies began earlier today with the morning session kicked off by none other than Andreas Antonopoulos. Antonopoulos' appearance as an expert witness before the committee is a puzzling choice due to Antonopoulos' history of involvement with numerous scams such as Neo&Bee and the Bitcoin Foundation. Antonopoulos is alleged to have lied to the Australian Senate by claiming that 2 billion unbanked were at Australia's doorstep.
Antonopoulos' testimony was followed by the appearance of Jared Taggart and Tony Alderman of the Australian Federal Police, Daniel Mossop of the Attorney General's Department, Hamish Hansford and John Moss of the Australian Crime Commission. Today's hearings will conclude after Kate Preston, Daniel McAuliffe and Jessica Mohr of the Treasury and Michael Hardy and Brett Peterson of the Australian Tax Office appear as witnesses.
The Senate Economics References Committee was due to hand down its findings into digital currency this month but that report has now been delayed until 10th August 2015.
Submissions made last year by the AFP, AG and ATO and discussed today are available to download.
To Antonopoulos's credit, he resigned from the Foundation a few months ago. He said it was because of lack of transparency from the Foundation. As for Neo & Bee, he may indeed have been just extremely naive and trusting.
This is reason enough to not trust him.
A big part of the issue I take with Antonopoulos is his refusal to take responsibility for lending his name and what little credibility he has to outfits such as Neo&Bee and the Bitcoin Foundation. When his friends, such as Stephanie Murphy, lend their voice to scams such as Bitcoin Trader, Antonopoulos turns around and says that she has nothing to apologise for.
Not once has he come hat in hand and apologised for giving these scams the look of legitimacy to the unsuspecting idiots who think every word out his mouth came from Satoshi himself. Antonopoulos has helped these scammers line their pockets with thousands of bitcoin yet he dismisses ALL criticism of anything he and his friends say and do as trolling.
Worse, Antonopoulos fronts the Australian Senate as an expert witness and tells them with a straight face that he forsees a future whereby kids in Indonesia are running a billion dollar remittance business atop a skateboard. It pisses me off because I've been following these hearings and to date, only Senator Bill Heffernan has managed to put 2 and 2 together by realising that Bitcoin threatens the government's sovereignty (I am not suggesting this is a bad thing but when Sen. Heffernan brought it up, the comment was laughed at and dismissed.).
Part of Antonopoulos' schtick is also to promote sexism and racism for he is never short of comments about the evils of white men.
Antonopoulos is no friend of bitcoin or its people.