I'll never understand protecting the middle class from "dangerous investments", but continuing to allow state-sponsored lotteries which are demonstrably scams.
I mean, it all boils down to the problems it causes in the fabric of the society and every society is different but when things happen at scale at dangerous rates dangerous things happen. You can be sure that if your citizens find a way to loose their savings quickly enough on lotteries you will have them banned too. If you have your citizens spending everything they have on chocolates, you will have chocolates banned despite being delicious.
These things tend to be reactionary IMHO. I wish we had a better reaction to the 2008 crisis though.
Don't worry though, if you have a lottery craze with too many people putting too much money in it and only few happen to profit, you will have lotteries banned.
Until that happens, people can freely loose their money and I am in favour of it. Let's not have commissions that decide where people buy their hopes and entertainment, right?
But that's the explicitly stated purpose of a lottery. The goal of the lottery is to have as many losers and as few winners as possible, in order to attract people with larger and larger jackpots.
At the current state of affairs a lot of people put in a little bit money and very few happen to profit from it. Due to the fact that most people put negligible amount in, it doesn't create societal problems, thus not banned. AFAIK there is max amount spent per person in some jurisdiction though.
Modern fiscal politics, from VAT onwards, is all about trying to tax the poor without them noticing.
Or, as the cynics over here refer to it "The Stupid Tax".
The odds of winning £1million on the UK National lottery are 14,000,000-1. If you really want to maximise your chances of winning £1million, go down your local friendly bookies and see if you can find 1,000,000-1 odds being offered on any stupendously unlikely event and put your money on that. Your bet is 14 times as likely to come up as your lottery ticket is.
The US income tax is even worse. The poor pay higher marginal rates than the rich as a result of overlapping benefits phase outs. Then there's payroll tax, which not only charges higher rates to ordinary people than billionaires, it hides half of what you're paying by pretending the employer is paying it, even though they're not -- but doesn't hide it when you're a small business owner, which provides a psychological deterrent to entrepreneurship.
The whole thing needs to be scrapped.
Personally I think this kind of use of the word "scam" spreads the meaning of the word too thin, making it much less effective when used to describe real scams.
Modern states don't see it as acceptable for private entities to transact however they like. There are aspects of taxation and law enforcement that are currently implemented via the monetary system and they don't want bitcoin et al to circumvent that.
If the quote is taken literally, then the concern lies with ensuring that ultimate control over the size of the money supply, interest rates, and inflation lies with government and not with the private sector.
Privately-issued currencies not backed by central banks are extremely vulnerable to liquidity crises (bank runs) and other failures. See the economic situations that lead to the establishment of central banks in most countries for examples.
If private, unbacked, currencies became widely used, internal crises could trigger recessions in the real economy. Most governments would rather avoid this risk by disallowing the establishment of substantive independent monetary systems.
And a bitcoin scam can rob you of thousands in a minute. That's a lot of lottery tickets.
Crypto investments are difficult to judge by the unsophisticated investor, and can easily be persuaded to invest large amounts. The loss is quite devastating for that individual. And when it happens, it makes for bad PR for the gov't and financial regulators. Better to nip it in the bud before it happens - even if it takes out investments that _would_ have been good for said unsophisticated investors. It's a conservative approach to policy making.
But people should have every right to make terrible investment decisions and lose all their money. There are investments in crypto that are good and bad just as in the stock market. Some people turn anything into gambling and thats a personal issue.
As an example, https://www.deutsche-bank.es/pbc/data/es/hazte-cliente-cuent...
Every product is given a risk between 1 and 6 where 1 is the most safe.
How stable do you think the prices of fiat currencies or assets such as gold would be, if governments were constantly trying to ban them, regulate them out of existence, render their use nigh on impossible, or otherwise stigmatise their usage?
Governments around the world are terrified of 'the people' being able to conduct financial transactions without themselves [government] and the financial sector getting a cut. They also loathe the idea of the anonymity and pseudo-anonymity cryptocurrencies offer. Government wants to know, at all times, where you are, where you go, who you associate with, what you say or write, what you spend your money on... etc. etc.
To a large extent the populace has given them much of this on a plate already by voluntarily carrying mobile tracking devices wherever we go and by paying for most of what we buy with our debit and credit cards. Widespread adoption of cryptocurrencies would really put a spanner in the omni-surveillance works and must therefore be stamped out at all costs.
Correction: Crypto investments are impossible to judge by even the most sophisticated investor.
The reason --- missing data, lack of transparency by unregulated exchanges.