Hacker News Reader

Comment by pylua | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the insight. It does feel like the organizations ability to interpret the laws is more related to a political agency than the letter of the law.

There should just be a letter of the law , analytical meaning branch of government.

View on HN

It's also useful to know that Congress created the SEC in response to the 1929 stock market crash. Their primary purpose is to prevent the conditions that caused that.

> There should just be a letter of the law , analytical meaning branch of government.

I don't think that's a thing that is possible. You can't write laws to cover every possible case, and writing them to be "self-interpreting" would be an extraordinarily difficult thing. Interpretation will always be required.

That’s why it’s a systemic failure . Years of law study to interpret laws with context long dropped. The fact that the sec let Coinbase last this long is proof the system is over complicated and cannot be maintained efficiently.

It's a systemic failure of analytics, not a systemic failure of the law.

> The fact that the sec let Coinbase last this long is proof the system is over complicated and cannot be maintained efficiently.

There are numerous other possible reasons it took this long for the SEC to take action, other than the system being overly complicated or inefficient (lack of workers, bigger fish to fry [prioritization], the evolution of Coinbase into less of a commodities trader and more of a securities trader). Complications and inefficiencies usually require additional time and effort, but additional time and effort is not an absolute indication that something is complicated or inefficient.

Yeah for the longest time Coinbase was mainly hosting the relatively old coins that tended to be closer to commodities than securities. While they were doing that it's a very different regulatory environment.

> The fact that the sec let Coinbase last this long is proof the system is over complicated and cannot be maintained efficiently.

I disagree with this assessment, but reasonable people can hold differing opinions on this.

"you can run a company for nearly a decade while spending a great deal on lawyers talking to the government the whole time and still have no clue if your business is legal"

There's a spectrum.

Is it reasonable to have them be completely unambiguous in every circumstances? No.

Is it reasonable to have them be unambiguous in the vast majority of circumstances? Yes.

> There should just be a letter of the law , analytical meaning branch of government.

This is called "a court".

(There is a particular phrase for "the law is unclear so I'm going to sue the regulator in advance to determine if something is legal", but I've forgotten it. It's linked to judicial review)

This is never how the law has worked

It's so much worse than that. "Laws should be exhaustively comprehensive" is a completely unworkable system. You cannot predict every possible combination of context and law, and attempting to do so would be literal combinatorics explosion.

People who push that kind of system know this, and want the system to be hamstrung by exactly that situation. They want a system that can only outlaw their new, explicitly harmful scheme after an entire game of politics in congress, such that they could prevent something becoming law by encouraging the already bad stonewalling in congress. They want government agencies to be so bound up by poorly written law that they cannot administrate at all.

I just want a system that is predictable , objective and that works quickly . Saying that there are flaws in the current system simply offends the gate keepers of the system.

I just want a billion dollars and a unicorn.

We both have to work in reality.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com