Thailand bans meme coin and NFT: “no clear objective or substance or underlying”
engadget.com
engadget.com
And while I'm no fan of NFTs, they seem as to have as much inherit value as any piece of art (whatever someone is willing to pay).
I personally think this is a pretty stupid decision, but iit should be pretty easy to fairly apply so long as the Thai SEC lays out clear guidelines on which currencies are approved.
And, I am avoiding making any sort of comment on whether currencies are worthy of being on that approved list. It's Thailand and the sovereign government has the right to make currency regulation decisions as arbitrarily as it wants.
You can't make people accept your own currency, but you can print it and use it for commercial purposes if people want to accept it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_community_currencies_i...
If they're worried about price influence by social media influencers, this is also a problem for other coins. Elon tweets, and the price of BTC varies. It's not just "meme coins" that's susceptible to this.
The logic that's been applied here is highly suspect to me.
Correct, and that is zero (or really negative) value. I see crypto as a plague on productive society. People think they can just get rich by investing in currency. It's insane. Value is being destroyed with all the attention wasted in the space. Governments need to step in and protect their citizens from this nonsense.
Why is it you think the government should be involved in this when they are demonstrably incompetents in keeping our basic Credit Cards and Checking Accounts safe from scammers and fraudulent attacks? Especially not keeping our elderly population safe.
They can't even keep public emails safe from a certain Secretary of State.
They can't keep a single man in a Prison safe from 'suiciding' while waiting for the court case of the century.
They can't even keep the phone companies accountable to the Do Not Call list for spam calls.
They cannot keep telco and cable companies from price gauging consumers for internet while at the same time enforcing lock downs that keep people at home- with children- that require internet access and lots of bandwidth. Many states holding the state residents hostage from any sort of options of providers.
If the crypto rush is the new gold rush and it is a burgeoning market, why should - or how could, the government save people from their personal decisions. Crypto itself is not fraud. We have laws against fraud if one specific instance is found to be fraudulent. Why should we make new laws to save people from their bad decisions? Honestly, those bad decisions started with the elected officials that aren't held accountable to the public as it is. So we're going to let incompetents govern incompetently for what exists and ask them to govern competently for NEW things? How peculiar.
Believing the government to be incompetent is a self-fulfilling prophecy:
- Only the incompetent or apathetic will choose to work for government and take the hit to their personal reputation.
- Underfunding leads to underperformance which leads to perceptions of incompetence which leads to underfunding.
- True incompetence, corruption, etc. start getting ignored as just "that's how the government is," so nobody tries to fix anything.
- Those who have a financial interest in reducing the capabilities of government will "starve the beast" and make it progressively more incompetent.
There are many functions of government that, though they could always do better, make the world better than it would be in their absence: fire departments, paramedics, infrastructure management (in areas where this is actually done reasonably well), utilities, financial crimes enforcement, agricultural and pharmaceutical quality enforcement, etc.
We're already pretty far down this road of destruction of competence, so I'm not sure how to turn things around, but that doesn't mean we have to keep driving forward into the land of feudalistic anarchocapitalism.
We don't.
> Underfunding leads to underperformance which leads to perceptions of incompetence which leads to underfunding.
Incompetence leads to underfunding. If they would get their shit together I would be fine with funding them (obv not for regulating the crypto market but just in general).
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-07-30-vw-18804-...
Look at the scam surrounding tether and all of the warnings that have been put out to warn crypto holders.
One of the roles of the SEC is to protect against piramid schemes and crypto has a lot of similarities with it.
Ps. Crypto is not "new", it's more than a decade old.
The U.S. govt, banks, and credit card companies have issues but there are also a lot of protections for the average person. The govt does get involved when it comes to finance, and that's fine. Things like tobacco and alcohol get regulated, and that's fine.
Cryptocurrencies aren't this magical thing that can't (or shouldn't) be touched by government. It was always a matter of time before the slow machine caught up.
> why should - or how could, the government save people from their personal decisions.
Because having a non-trivial amount of citizens losing their life savings on snakeoil, get-rich-quick schemes is a net negative for society. Plenty of laws and regulations exist -precisely- to prevent or save people from their bad decisions. That's what a government and society is -for-, not to say "too bad, kid, you should've known".
Fiat works because a government for and by the people backs it. The government provides protection, services, and a means for the citizens to be productive.
Crypto provides none of this. Only a pyramid shape for the early adopters to get rich off the latecomers.
Nobody elects crypto whales or maintainers. You can't force them out of office. That's a bad structure for society.
Crypto is far from equitable and democratized. It's just a bunch of "finance bros" with code and cryptography, and all the power is at the top. It even lacks the release valves that fiat has.
Here's the problem - replace [currency] with any of many other things and the statement is still valid. You need to explain why crypto specifically deserves more hate than, say, Forex or options trading.
If you feel strongly about it, you should short Bitcoin. I wouldn't recommend doing so, but if that is your conviction you have the option to put your money where your mouth is.
Bitcoin for example was created to be electronic cash, but today most people treat is as a "digital gold" and a store of value, but not as something to be used in regular day-to-day transactions.
And Dogecoin was indeed created as a joke, but it doesn't stop it from being used to buy things (3% of all BitPay purchases[1]), and in contrast to Bitcoin the community wants to keep it affordable. So in a way, you can argue that Dogecoin follows Satoshi's vision more than even Bitcoin does.
~2000 for dogecoin.
Most of the purchases are gift cards ( a method for money laundering)
That kinda sums up how useful it is to add crypto to your e-commerce.
There are less than 10 x amount of purchases through crypto than amount of different crypto.
It just got easier and quicker. But in general, people won't put their private life on display, just what they want to share and "impress" with or nag about.
If you want to see damage to lives where things get shared in public, it's something like revenge p** where the government will protect the victim through the legal system and their actual private life was shared by harmful actors.
The purpose of banning a type of financial transaction is to avoid stories where a retiree, or other vulnerable person loses their life savings because they got hooked into a get rich quick scheme. These bans only make sense when it's deemed utterly irrational to participate in the transaction for either all buyers or all sellers.
It's pretty easy to understand why someone who has a modest nest egg/retirement portfolio could be pushed into a bet the house situation if they don't understand what they are buying and aren't particularly financially literate.
asdf78as6df7sda67f6das7f6dafdfads7fdafd6sa7
It's mine now.
No, that is not 100% effective in stopping people from trading these coins, but it doesn't have to be, and it' not even necessarily the intention - note that it's not even a law but an SEC decision.
https://www.livebitcoinnews.com/crypto-exchange-in-thailand-...
The hard part isn't the tech (DRM can't be perfect, but it doesn't stop other solutions from being sold), its getting buy-in from the IP industry lobby. They probably cringe at the idea of digital access rights being resold or traded as it erodes their monopoly pricing power.
Being able to trade movies and songs at release sounds fun, and I'm sure wallstreetbets style traders would pile in if the ecosystem develops enough confidence. Would also allow content creators to recoup investment much faster at the expense of long tail royalty type earnings - which some may find very attractive.