There's a sushi joke in there somewhere
Moreover, “regulation” is not a synonym of “good and righteous”, especially in the US, where things are quite shady when you look from the outside. FTX was the dear of the regulators, and ended us as a massive scam. The recurrent crises in the banking sector show that regulation is, frankly, quite useless.
Furthermore, the US has a long history of using “regulation” as a way to do financial repression against its population and other countries. Crypto, among all the scams and dubious projects, is one of the last harbingers of financial freedom in a world that gets darker and darker every day on that aspect.
Don't believe me? Well, the day you'll be on the longer end of the stick, you'll understand.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/securities_act_of_1933
But you bring up great points, and that's exactly why we use a political system called a "representative democracy" where if you don't like the laws, you can vote for those that align with your worldview, you can run for office yourself, or you can lobby your politicians to change them.
(Breaking the law is unfortunately not on that list.)
"Vote for those who align your worldviews" in a bipartisan political system is laughable, same as "lobbying". JPMorgan can indeed lobby to protect its interests, regular citizens can't, or have to waste an amount of energy so high, for results so meaningless while doing it that it's useless in the end. Hence, the real citizens are the ones who have access to the system, be them corporations or oligarchs.
But to go back to the original argument, what's the problem here? All of this is virtual and doesn't affect the real world. Unlike the US banking system that needs taxpayer's money to bail itself out every 15 years like clockwork, the crypto space lives on its own.
Truth is, this crackdown is quite beneficial to the ecosystem, as all devs are leaving the US, or will have to. In the end we'll have a much more balanced tech sector, unlike now where the USA imposes its cultural norms and practices on the rest of the world.
Everyone who was of voting age who could have voted for senators who ratified the income tax amendment is dead now. There is no person now living under the sixteenth amendment that was involved in its passage.
None of us alive today were voting for congressional reps back in '33; correspondingly the securities act applying to us is not in any way related to representative democracy. It might as well be dictatorial edict for all of our involvement.
Note that I didn't propose any alternate system, I just pointed out that the majority of the laws we live under were not a result of our being represented in any way.
A law passed 51-49 should not persist after that legislative period has passed.
A law passed 100-0 may be reasonable to persist for 50 years.
Offering unregistered securities, in apparent violation of the Securities Exchange Act. It's astounding how people think they can skirt the law without even familiarizing themselves with the law.
Car accident related deaths show that seat belts are, frankly, quite useless.
What's happening, however is that, since the Patriot act, financial freedoms and the right to privacy became a meme. The state and the banking sector has more and more to say about how you spend your money and earn it. Fact is that a totalitarian regime would have to vote very few laws to enforce itself.
Crypto is a backstop against this.
https://decrypt.co/123751/euler-finance-hacker-sends-1-6m-et...
SushiSwap is not going to be sanctioned. It's not clear what the U.S. could do to shut it down in the same manner, although of course, they could bring enforcement actions like this one and scare off any U.S. person from working on it.