Bitcoin Daily: US House Hearing To Look At SMB Blockchain Benefits

The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Small Businesses is going to hold a hearing on the benefits of blockchain technology for entrepreneurs.

The hearing is set for Wednesday, March 4 at 11:30 a.m. ET, and will be called “Building Blocks of Change: The Benefits of Blockchain Technology for Small Businesses.”

The hearing will explore the ways small business entrepreneurs have used blockchain to boost productivity and increase security.

Committee Chairwoman Nydia M. Velazquez listed some of the other uses for blockchain, including tracking goods in global supply chains or enabling peer-to-peer transactions between connected devices.

Among the witnesses who will testify before the committee are Ownum CEO Shane McRann Bigelow, PopCom CEO Dawn Dickson, general counsel for Protocol Labs Marvin Ammori and Jim Harper, visiting fellow for the American Enterprise Institute.

As the hearing approaches, businesses and governments around the world have been exploring the use of blockchain technology for the aforementioned goods-tracking services, along with other things like increasing transparency and trust among stakeholders.

Bigelow said he hopes the hearing will help establish the U.S. as a leader in blockchain technology, in a matter similar to how the country became a global leader in the earliest days of the internet in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Bigelow said the Committee on Small Business was doing the country a favor in starting off the year by tackling an issue he considered so important.

Other areas of the U.S. government have been attempting to tackle cryptocurrency issues. U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin said last month that the government would introduce new rules about crypto at the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Mnuchin spoke of the need for a balance between allowing the tech to move forward in an uninhibited manner for inventions and new ideas, and also making sure that money laundering and crime do not escalate.