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With the United States and China vying for dominance in every aspect and realm imaginable experts have begun issuing a warning for a new Cold War beginning. With emerging technology, the US has been heavily invested in maintaining dominance except for one place and that would be cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. The approaches taken by both of these governments have been particularly dramatically different. While China has really embraced the technology more than other governments by rolling out a digital yuan the US has been very hesitant to do much and has really taken a lukewarm stance.
For China and its allies, this could be a way to circumvent future financial restrictions place on people, places, or organizations. This would eliminate the threat of blacklisting or sanctioning governments or entities. China has rapidly rolled out and expanded its initial digital yuan project thus really showing the capabilities of a Central Bank Digital Currency of CBDC while in the United States it is different businesses like MicroStrategy and Tesla that have become pillars of the industry. This is further shown in Bitcoin mining with the mining power or Hashrate provided originating over half the time from China. With roughly 60% give or take coming from China this is something the US Government does not want to see as they prefer to be the leader. Even a large chunk of the mining rigs come from Chinese companies.
This has kickstarted a movement in the US where businesses are raising money to mine Bitcoin at home. Again the US government is not helping in any way but American companies are starting to see that too much Chinese influence could be bad and thus are willing to spend the higher costs associated with mining in the US or really any developed country.
With this being an emerging technology and the government not making their stance on the legality of certain aspects being legal or not it was hard initially for US companies to operate in this field and thus has allowed the Chinese State to rush ahead in developing and patenting the technology. This could be particularly harmful within the distributed LEDGER field as if a country begins to control aspects that could become key in the future it undermines other countries' security. It could further hamper other countries developing Central Bank Digital Currencies as if key aspects are being held "hostage" by another government on either side it could be used as a financial weapon against other countries and their allies.
Just like the Space Race in the 1950s and 1960s, the US has already started out behind. Will the government do what was done when racing against the USSR and open the money fountain into the development of these technologies or will they just try and let businesses play the catchup game. Either way, the damage is done just like when the USSR launched the first satellite into orbit and China has really come flying out of the gates in patenting technology related to this area of future technology.
