Marc Serafino
Australia is gearing towards becoming a “bitcoin paradise,” with Labor and Coalition senators crossing the political divide to call on the country’s Reserve Bank to embrace bitcoins as an official form of currency. The idea, they say, is to secure the future competitiveness of Australia’s $145 billion a year financial services industry.
Labor senator Sam Dastyari and Liberal senator Jane Hume have teamed-up for the bill after watching the price of bitcoin skyrocketing from 10¢ per coin in 2010 to $4,070 per bitcoin last week. Those are Australian dollars, in case you wonder.
Senator Dastyari said the digital currency had now become a serious financial player and Australia risked being left behind if it did not pursue developing its own official currency and blockchain to use on the market.
“The question for Australia is are we going to follow or are we going to lead. We need to find a bipartisan way of doing this,” Senator Dastyari said. “We can’t compete with our Asian neighbors when it comes to producing cheap goods and services anymore. We can compete when it comes to financial services but that is going to mean big, bold decisions.”
Senator Hume added that the country needs its own blockchain. “The opportunities for government, academia, and the private sector are enormous,” she said.
Something similar was echoed by the chairman of the Australian Digital Currency Commerce Association, Ronald Tucker, who said that the Australian government backed crypto currency would eliminate settlement times and foreign currency exchanges.
“It would be an auditor’s dream because you’ll be able to see any transaction that moves on it,” he said.
In 2016, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission cleared banks of any wrongdoing after they withdrew banking services to local bitcoin companies. However, until May 2017, bitcoin was classified as an “intangible asset” by the Tax Office, which meant the Goods and Services Tax was charged twice during transactions, once on the product being bought and once on the bitcoin itself.
“This will be a revolutionary leap for the Reserve Bank and for Australian financial institutions, what we want to do here in Parliament is to create the political environment to allow that leap [for an Australian bitcoin blockchain] to occur,” Senator Dastyari concluded.
[Via: The Sydney Morning Herald]
