INTERROGAZIONE: 11 DOMANDE SULL’ACCORDO LUGANO-TETHER E SUL PLAN ₿
Il Municipio di Lugano nel documento “Risposta alle interpellanze e interrogazione n. 4200, 4201 e 1272” del 4 aprile 2022 risponde alla domanda 1.6 dell’interpellanza 4200, indicando che è stato firmato “un protocollo d’intesa” con Tether, che è pubblicato all’indirizzo web planb.lugano.ch
Sul sito (nella rubrica Chi siamo) effettivamente si trova un documento in inglese nell’articolo intitolato: 3 marzo 2022, la Città e Tether Operations Limited hanno firmato un Memorandum of Understanding per la collaborazione sul Plan ₿.
La natura di questo documento non è chiara. Essendo di durata quadriennale potrebbe essere una convenzione che deve essere approvata dal Consiglio comunale di Lugano ai sensi dell’art. 9bis capoverso 1 lettera f del Regolamento comunale della Città di Lugano (Delega 1 Sono delegate al Municipio le competenze decisionali in materia di: (…) f. convenzioni per una durata massima di due anni e per un onere annuo derivante dalla convenzione non superiore a fr. 75’000.–.).
Con la presente interrogazione chiediamo al lodevole Municipio:
1. può fornire al Consiglio comunale la traduzione in italiano del Memorandum tra la Città di Lugano e Tether?
2. Il Memorandum tra la Città di Lugano e Tether è formalmente una convenzione?
3. Se il Memorandum tra la Città di Lugano e Tether non è una convenzione, giuridicamente che tipo di documento è?
4. In base alla legge organica comunale chi è competente per approvare il Memorandum tra la Città di Lugano e Tether?
5. Quante sono state le spese a carico della Città di Lugano per il Plan ₿ nel 2022?
6. Quanto sono state le spese a carico di enti privati per il Plan ₿ nel 2022?
7. Chi sono gli enti privati che sostengono il Plan ₿? In che modo lo fanno concretamente? In base a quali accordi?
8. Chi sono gli specialisti interdisciplinari, i legali esterni e il personale interno all’amministrazione cui il Municipio ha fatto capo per gli approfondimenti della fattispecie, indicati nella risposta alla domanda 10 dell’interpellanza 4200? A quanto ammontano gli esborsi anno per anno?
9 Chi sono gli istituti bancari coinvolti nel Plan ₿? Quali sono gli accordi da essi conclusi per il Plan ₿?
10. Come valuta la presa di posizione estremamente critica sulle criptovalute indirizzata da 1’500 esperti alle autorità del Congresso americano lo scorso 1. giugno 2022 nella Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy? Una lettera che contesta duramente il carattere innovativo di questa tecnologia nell’ambito finanziario e ne denuncia altrettanto duramente l’opacità, l’inutilità economica, i rischi di frode e truffa.
11. Come la valuta presa di posizione del responsabile operativo dell’Osservatorio ticinese sulla criminalità organizzata, Francesco Lepori: “Più enti, nazionali e internazionali, hanno lanciato allarmi sull’uso improprio delle monete virtuali. Il Gruppo di coordinamento interdipartimentale per la lotta al riciclaggio di denaro e il finanziamento del terrorismo ha definito “considerevole” i pericoli legati alle criptovalute e la vulnerabilità della Svizzera al riguardo.” (Il Ceresio, 11/12 2022).
Con distinti saluti
Raoul Ghisletta, Edoardo Cappelletti, Mattea David, Dario Petrini, Aurelio Sargenti
Allegato citato alla domanda 10
Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy
June 1, 2022
The Honorable Charles E. Schumer
Majority Leader
U.S. Senate
Washington, DC 20510
The Honorable Mitch McConnell
Minority Leader
U.S. Senate
Washington, DC 20510
The Honorable Nancy Pelosi
Speaker
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20510
The Honorable Kevin McCarthy
Minority Leader
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20510
The Honorable Debbie Stabenow
Chairwoman
Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry
U.S. Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510
The Honorable John Boozman
Ranking Member
Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry
U.S. Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510
The Honorable Sherrod Brown
Chairman
Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs
U.S. Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510
The Honorable Patrick J. Toomey
Ranking Member
Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs
U.S. Senate
Washington, D.C. 2051
The Honorable Ron Wyden
Chairman
Senate Committee on Finance
U.S. Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510
The Honorable Mike Crapo
Ranking Member
Senate Committee on Finance
U.S. Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510
The Honorable Maxine Waters
Chairwoman
House Financial Services Committee
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20510
The Honorable Patrick McHenry
Ranking Member
House Financial Services Committee
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20510
Dear U.S. Congressional Leadership, Committee Chairs and Ranking Members,
We are 1500 computer scientists, software engineers, and technologists who have spent decades working in these fields producing innovative and effective products for a variety of applications in the fields of database technology, open-source software, cryptography, and financial technology applications.
Today, we write to you urging you to take a critical, skeptical approach toward industry claims that crypto-assets (sometimes called cryptocurrencies, crypto tokens, or web3) are an innovative technology that is unreservedly good. We urge you to resist pressure from digital asset industry financiers, lobbyists, and boosters to create a regulatory safe haven for these risky, flawed, and unproven digital financial instruments and to instead take an approach that protects the public interest and ensures technology is deployed in genuine service to the needs of ordinary citizens.
We strongly disagree with the narrative—peddled by those with a financial stake in the crypto-asset industry—that these technologies represent a positive financial innovation and are in any way suited to solving the financial problems facing ordinary Americans.
Not all innovation is unqualifiedly good; not everything that we can build should be built. The history of technology is full of dead ends, false starts, and wrong turns. Append-only digital ledgers are not a new innovation. They have been known and used since 1980 for rather limited functions.
As software engineers and technologists with deep expertise in our fields, we dispute the claims made in recent years about the novelty and potential of blockchain technology. Blockchain technology cannot, and will not, have transaction reversal or data privacy mechanisms because they are antithetical to its base design. Financial technologies that serve the public must always have mechanisms for fraud mitigation and allow a human-in-the-loop to reverse transactions; blockchain permits neither.
By its very design, blockchain technology is poorly suited for just about every purpose currently touted as a present or potential source of public benefit. From its inception, this technology has been a solution in search of a problem and has now latched onto concepts such as financial inclusion and data transparency to justify its existence, despite far better solutions to these issues already in use. Despite more than thirteen years of development, it has severe limitations and design flaws that preclude almost all applications that deal with public customer data and regulated financial transactions and are not an improvement on existing non-blockchain solutions.
Finally, blockchain technologies facilitate few, if any, real-economy uses. On the other hand, the underlying crypto-assets have been the vehicle for unsound and highly volatile speculative investment schemes that are being actively promoted to retail investors who may be unable to understand their nature and risk. Other significant externalities include threats to national security through money laundering and ransomware attacks, financial stability risks from high price volatility, speculation and susceptibility to run risk, massive climate emissions from the proof-of-work technology utilized by some of the most widely traded crypto-assets, and investor risk from large scale scams and other criminal financial activity.
We implore you to take a truly responsible approach to technological innovation and ensure that individuals in the US and elsewhere are not left vulnerable to predatory finance, fraud, and systemic economic risks in the name of technological potential which does not exist.
The catastrophes and externalities related to blockchain technologies and crypto-asset investments are neither isolated nor are they growing pains of a nascent technology. They are the inevitable outcomes of a technology that is not built for purpose and will remain forever unsuitable as a foundation for large-scale economic activity.
Given these vast externalities, together with the—at best still-ambiguous and at worst non-existent—uses of blockchain, we recommend that the Committee look beyond the hype and bluster of the crypto industry and understand not only its inherent flaws and extraordinary defects but also the litany of technological fallacies it is built upon.
We need to act now to protect investors and the global financial marketplace from the severe risks posed by crypto-assets and must not be distracted by technical obfuscations which mask an abject lack of technological utility. We thank you for your leadership on financial technology and regulation and urge you to consider our objective and independent expert judgments to guide your legislative priorities, which we remain happy to discuss anytime.