Crypto unlikely to survive as investment if unregulated, SEC chairman says

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102#:~:text=E....

That article uses the term hoarding but don't be fooled they made holding any relevant amount of gold for investment illegal. You were still allowed to have gold necklaces and the like though

But agreed, what you've described is the most-likely outcome.

I think people should be allowed to choose. If they don't want regulation then fine.

who says? that premise seems to operate on the idea that justice only works on stuff that can be returned to its previous state.

if anything crypto has proven that big heists don't pay off because naughty wallets get immediately blacklisted by exchanges.

It's also rather difficult to actually recover losses in court in a civil case unless you're rich enough/the amount at stake is large enough to eat the losses in court fees/collections measures and still make a profit (winning a judgement does nothing if the losing party simply refuses to pay, at which point you have to engage the Sherrif/place liens on property/hire collections agencies/etc). Whether it should be that way or not, that's the reality. These same folks allow that system as well.

I'm more inclined to think the regulators will go the way of rich/those who make campaign contributions/those who can lobby. I wish we didn't live in that world, but we do. The evidence that we do has been unmistakable since 2008. So some of the scammier micro-cap coins might get regulated out of existence, but with Wall St taking an interest and plenty of wealthy people on board, crypto as a whole is going to stick around IMO.

Stolen property is stolen property. Not all stolen property is recoverable. Even stolen property with a paper trail may not be recoverable (ask Bernie Madoff fraud victims who have expensive lawyers) or may not be compensate-able. Cars, bikes, phones, etc. get stolen every day. If I meet someone to buy something for $1000 cash and they just run off with it, I've little recourse.

I'm a crypto proponent, and I'm pretty pro regulation.

The reason is because integrating current legal systems with crypto actually makes it more powerful and valuable. Existing legal frameworks can be used to link a purely digital world to the physical world; ex. for us to reliably trade tokens in physical assets (house, painting), we need courts and systems we can leverage for confidence and rule of law.

Therein lies a tradeoff and irony, by mixing such systems. You might say "just build it on a centralized system", and in an ideal world that would be great. The problem is that bureaucracy and politicization of systems make it impossible for innovation to occur: simply look at the friction facing car sharing (Uber), online betting/gambling, housing sharing (Airbnb), etc. Those things can't be the wild west, but society is clearly better off and wants those services.

I suspect some jurisdictions will be friendlier to crypto and more willing to explore those spaces. Innovation will flock there, and eventually everyone else will just follow.

There are crypto networks that does betting. The natural next thing is insurance, which can be considered a special case of betting.

The "harsh" truth might very well be, that a lot of industries that have been governed by priviliged organisations will turn into algorithmically governed DAOs.

A lot of people in the financial sector will probably loose their job, as cheaper alternatives for financial products will occur in self regulated algorithmically governed systems.

The "bitcoin is the crypto definition" view should be abandoned. And it should be understood that crypto means algoritgmically governed economies for now. Later it will be algorithmic governance.

Ie. Cryptos market cap is at least equal to the financial sector. And probably we are only scratching the surface with that statement.

It's never just pure mathematics. You always have a human layer on top, and that means that there is an attack surface for self-interested people to take advantage of others. The purpose of regulation is to minimize the damage those people can do.

I suppose in a future where all the humans are extinct, and monolithic AI's rule the planet, your comment would hold more water.

That's the point. I'm not sure why people think that crypto is just going to be allowed to exist outside of government control. Of course government is going to want to get their hands in it. And while the technology might be resistant to that, there are still other things the government can do, just like they do with fiat, to gain control of crypto. For example, putting you in jail I you don't do what they want. Exactly like they do with taxes in the US.

Regulations would probably also hit, eg., in-game economies, that are essentially the same as crypto economies, just them being controlled by a central agent.

Essentially it would mean a ban on ... platform?

...

This is kind of philosophically interesting in light of Giorgio Agamben's discussion of sovereignty and law, in which the prime act of the sovereign is to enact the "ban", i.e. deciding who or what is excluded from the law, which is itself still a status in relation to the law, specifically one of exclusion. So people who trade crypto can be unregulated in the sense of gray area, yet-undecided legality, or they can be "unregulated" in the sense of "explicitly excluded from the legal realm", banned (abandoned), removed from any sort of legal relationship with the state. The USA isn't China, where the idea of someone being "unpersoned" for trading crypto seems like an act that the state could choose to make, but that's the sort of thing I thought would make a good joke.