I find it really weird how crypto folks keep pretending that financial regulation is an obviously bad thing, as opposed to restrictions put in place in response to real problems
These are two premise which... don't seem to hold water?
Governments can arbitrarily censor legal payments at will, without legal cause.
One quite essential feature of a clearinghouse is the ability to correct the books in case of operational errors, in response to court orders etc.
People lose their passwords, get scammed, go bankrupt, die and leave their possessions to their next of kin... It's very hard to achieve the desired/expected outcome for any of these situations on a blockchain.
Cash doesn't have a built-in paper trail and dispute resolution mechanism, all of which are highly desirable when doing business with unknown/not yet trustworthy entities.
In many (definitely not all!) cases, transaction finality is a bug, not a feature.
And the one time I had a dispute, Visa claimed that the transaction was out of policy somehow (timeframe, region, etc)
So no, that better alternative doesn’t favor the customer
In the case of card payments, merchants incur a fee for every transaction reversed through the card scheme, whereas voluntary refunds are essentially free. They are accordingly incentivized to understand and follow the scheme rules.
> And the one time I had a dispute, Visa claimed that the transaction was out of policy somehow (timeframe, region, etc)
That's unfortunate, and mistakes or seemingly unfair decisions do happen – just like in a public legal system. But you are essentially basing your opinion on a sample size of one.
Practically, some banks just seem to be better (i.e. more consumer friendly) at dispute resolution than others. As an example, in the case of a high profile airline bankruptcy in my country, some banks have proactively reached out to their customers, letting them know they're happy to pursue disputes for them, while others were declining them outright due to a – likely wrong – understanding of scheme rules and bankruptcy law.
There is no such evidence. There are those who benefit from inflation (and only if it's predictable for them) but the majority of people don't. Unless you define economy as something only the wealthy can benefit from - no, inflation is not good.
In contrast, the rich are much more likely to have bonds or cash holdings. They are the ones for whom inflation is a real problem. Why else would all this political pressure for a 2% inflation target exist? It's because that's low enough for the rich, not because it's high.
Printing money and redistributing it would severely impact capital holders, like it did in the post WWII boom which created the middle class.
Here is an entire book on this topic :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_...
The wealth redistribution post-WW2 had more to do with the war itself than inflation though.
So back to the 21st century: what makes you think that those who have excess capital don't invest wisely? Compare that to lack of any excess capital for the majority.
If you're in a third world country, you likely don't have access to robust, transparent local stock markets. Whatever exchanges might exist tend to be rife with scammy companies, insider trading and poor regulation. If you want to invest in, say, the US stock market, you'd have to jump through a ton of hoops or have a ton of money, essentially locking out all but the wealthiest.
These crypto "stocks" essentially allow anyone living anywhere to "invest" in top-tier stocks like AAPL.
I don't see any reason why you'd buy these crypto stocks if you're living in the US. But if you're living in Somalia or Madagascar? Hell yes.
Again, all the crypto criticism is very myopic and first world. HN needs to step out of that POV to understand the value. Decentralized, global markets don't benefit first world citizens, but they definitely level the playing field for us third worlders.
https://paxful.com/buy/bitcoin/madagascar
How many more hoops do you then have to jump through to acquire fake stocks?
Second, you then have to make sure you avoid pyramid schemes (like OneCoin), rug pulls, exit scams, bad exchanges and bad "smart" contracts (like the Parity bug).
This is not easy even for highly informed tech workers in the Global North. Now if you happen to speak another language (as I do) I recommend you go and Google "how to invest in Defi" or whatever in it. In my case (French), you get just articles after articles that are sponsored content from very dubious sounding wallet and exchanges, especially if you add "Madagascar" or "Congo" or whatever to your search.
So frankly, I think the idea that "crypto markets are great for the Global South" is more of a convenient story.
I don't really understand the resistance about this - an imperfect process is always better than no process.
Could things be improved? 100% yes. But that doesn't mean this truly global, permissionless market is somehow a scam.
While decentralized permissionless markets can (and have) helped some individuals escape economic restrictions (capital controls, sanctions, etc.) it's not at all clear to me that they have had an overall positive effect, or ever will.
At the end of the day, the rise in the price of bitcoin, scams like AfriCrypt and OneCoin, the new Salvador laws etc are all just new means of extracting capital from the Global South. I'm of the opinion that the benefits to individuals are not balancing the overall societal harms, but I could see how someone with a more individualistic ideology would disagree.
I'm hoping this will change as the ecosystem matures.
The notion of having the money to invest in stocks is made from a position of privilege
Say what you want, for me personally traditional banking is more of a burden than anything.
1. The practical: It’s not that regulation is bad but that many existing regulations are bad. They make obviously useful things illegal or impractical, are often worded in such a way they are basically impossible to apply to, for example, peer-to-peer systems. It’s possible to imagine (and indeed we should, and some countries are!) good regulation that is less stifling. (Note also that no regulation of specific financial products is required to make fraud and mis-selling illegal.)
2. The political: Financial regulations as they stand enable a huge surveillance and censorship/control apparatus. Purportedly this helps prevent terrorism etc. but many people do not agree that this is the right trade off. Financial regulations currently also give a handful of countries (and one in particular) a lot of power over the global financial system. Many believe they have too much power. These are political arguments but it is not a completely inexplicable political position for someone to be against financial surveillance and censorship, particularly when it comes to the US and other countries using them to exert power outside their borders. In which case, the financial regulatory environment we currently have is “bad” in that it delivers those things.
3. The countercultural: Cryptography and cryptocurrency are intertwined with countercultural groups and thinking (most obviously, but not exclusively the “cypherpunks”) because they are tools that allow activists, anarchists, subversives, marginalised or oppressed groups, organised crime (which, yes, is a form of counterculture), and others to communicate and operate more effectively and with lower risk. This means those groups are more highly represented in crypto. Obviously they’re likely to think rules that make their lives harder are bad. (This may seem like the “bad group” and maybe you like them being shut out and suppressed, but much social and political progress started as persecuted countercultural movements and subversive ideas.)
So yeah… is financial regulation bad? No. Not always and not necessarily.
Are current financial regulations bad? Yes if you value innovation, have certain political beliefs, or are part of a group that is (intentionally or otherwise) shut out of the system by them.
Let’s try and have better rules!
It's a kind of arrogance that they personally don't feel like there's a colossal power asymmetry they need protection from and cryptocurrency proves this.
Perhaps some are clued enough to not get steamrollered by institutions and fraudsters, however they appear to have utter contempt and disregard for people who lack the time or ability or learning speed to protect themselves.