There’s growing unease in Washington that last month’s launch of a new Chinese digital yuan threatens the dollar’s preeminence as the world’s reserve currency. Questions about the new cryptocurrency have come up repeatedly in recent weeks during Congressional testimony, particularly regarding places like Africa, where U.S. anxieties about China already run quite high.

Americans are right to be worried about China’s ambitions to deploy its own blockchain-enabled cryptocurrency but probably for very different reasons than those circulating within the DC discourse.