Buys/Sells temporarily disabled on Coinbase

(2) Equities+bonds trade less than 8 hours a day, no more than 5 days a week in most markets. BitCoin is a 24/7 marketplace. Not exactly apples-apples.

(3) You are comparing a company (CoinBase) with an industry (financial equities market-making). If it's "unacceptable", the company's reputation will pay a price and they may be sued by regulators and/or AGs.

(4) As late as last week, Gary Cohen stated that the WH is going to be hands-off of BitCoin for now, so there is no "regulatory perspective" unless (presumably) there is actual provable fraud or their stance changes.

(5) "absolutely unacceptable" is what a significant portion of US voters thought of the financial and automotive bailouts, yet they still happened and the people swallowed it. At least CoinBase is a voluntary contract with their end-user.

edit: I derped on how old BitCoin is now

The reality is that while they feel related, they have enough subtle differences that comparisons fall apart. The world of finance is one of the most heavily regulated worlds, around[0]. It's also something that touches every one of our lives whether we want it to or not. Crypto-exchanges, on the other hand, are very lightly regulated (or not at all -- even to the point where Coinbase doesn't send 1099s and the IRS is having to figure out exactly what to do with them). The light regulation has led to things like people losing their entire wallets -- often with no recourse -- when they're held by third parties (and sometimes first- parties, but that's nobody's fault but the hacker and the individual who failed to protect his wallet properly).

Part of this is government not having caught up[1] but I'd like to think that part of it is the fact that cryptocurrency is a financial vehicle that doesn't compare well to other parts of finance. In some ways it's a lot like cash -- I lose it, it's gone and there's little that I can do about that. It also can be anonymous like cash. It, however, has the portability (is that the right word?) of a regulated account held by a bank (credit/checking/savings)[2].

Those who don't feel that privacy is important in financial transactions[4] will argue for regulating it similarly to other forms of banking and with that will either come more robust systems (because failure to provide said systems will result in fines/loss of licenses) or the collapse of the whole thing[3]. On the flip side, with values as high as they are, the probability that someone will set a new standard of uptime and security (along with insurance of account holdings) as a matter of pure capitalistic competition is also a strong possibility, but things are way too young to know with any degree of certainty where that will fall.

And then there's the issue of the value of privacy[6] to cryptocurrency enthusiasts. Would regulating it to acquire the reliability required from a business perspective result in the elimination of the value that cryptocurrency offers (assuming, as I would assume, that regulation would include elimination/penalizing anything short of the lack-of-privacy offered by traditional financial instruments).

I'm in the "bubble" camp (and have been for 4 years ... so, in other words, I've been wrong for at least 4 years). I find all of this fascinating from more than just an "I love crypto" side of things. Economic behavior is supposed to avoid things with efficiency problems like this, not reward them (and obscenely at that), but that's what's happened. What does that say about the economic state and choices available to the average person?[7] On the one hand, it could say that crypto-currency has filled a need (and I think regardless of where one falls on the spectrum of "it's a net good/net bad thing", you can't ignore this fact -- these aren't baseball cards -- they're worse -- they're bits in a distributed database). On the other hand, it speaks to there being something very wrong with how money is regulated, or finance is handled as a whole if these same bits are the single best investment you could have made among any of your choices in the last 8 years or so. If, for instance, I want to be a day trader, I need to have $25,000 available. If I want to investigate a privately held company for investment, there are similar financial requirements. If I want to trade BTC for ETH for PIRL for XMR for ZEC and do so over a period of minutes (well, maybe longer in the case of BTC), I don't need to ask for permission. While those regulations are there to protect ignorant people from losing their life savings through legalized gambling, they also prevent a small-time investor from being able to be a citizen in that world (I don't need another mommy). And, anecdotally, I personally know 10 people who are trading in cryptocurrency "because they can" and are not buying/selling stocks in the same manner because they lack the funds to have that freedom. And two of those people have a 13 year old computer hooked up to the internet via a connection a little better than dial-up (rural folks, no choice)[7].

So while I whole-heartedly agree that it's an unacceptable amount of time to freeze funds from trading, were they a main-stream business in finance, I'm OK with the trade-off -- especially considering the age of this particular beast. I hope there will be a wave of anti-regulation similar to what we saw in the 90s with the internet -- yes, bubble and all. I'm not at all confident that will happen (as it suffers from a similar issue of comparison), but if it's allowed to grow without interference, I sense that when things shake out and the bubble bursts, we'll end up with a set of technologies that we'll be the better -- as a society -- for having.

[0] Heavily regulated should not be read to imply "well" or "effectively" regulated. Arguably, health care is probably more regulated (in the United States), but I can't come up with another that fits above finance.

[1] And considering how the rest of the financial world is regulated, I'm of the opinion that's a good thing despite the losses, but that's not what I'm writing about.

[2] With those last two parts being the reason governments have (and those that haven't, eventually will) started applying varying degrees of regulation down to outright banning its use.

[3] I'm not sure if it's still the case, but when NY state introduced complex licensing and regulations around crypto-currency, it basically eliminated those businesses in the state along with it.

[4] IIRC, there was an attempt to prosecute someone on money laundering based on BTC transactions in the state of FL with the end-result being that the judge declared BTC wasn't money.

[5] Oh, if only we looked at "money" in the right eyes -- as a tool, not an end unto itself. I'm always reminded of the oft-misquoted bible verse "Money is the root of all evil" with the misquote being the near-opposite when read with the beginning part of that sentence "For the love of money is the root of all evil".

[6] Yes, yes. I know, most blockchain based currencies are nothing resembling anonymous and are -- in fact -- far more public than those taking place in your bank account. Some, however, offer privacy as a feature (ZEC/XMR) and this will only get better if allowed. Even having to say "if allowed" makes me a little sick to my stomach -- as if as a society, we're conditioned that we need to ask permission before doing anything new.

[7] And are the perfect example of why I think this is a "bubble" -- they haven't the foggiest idea of what, exactly, they're investing in. But they're also not fools -- they've only invested $200 -- not a significant amount by any stretch ... and the return they've gotten has dwarfed their other -- significantly larger investments. But, they know what they don't know and haven't put any more money outside of the $200 they started on and have taken, last I checked, 4 times that much out.