The SEC's position is simple: the same rules apply to crypto as to other financial products. After FTX, nobody is seriously opposing that any more. The "crypto is special" argument is dead. The scams are not even original - the scams are Ponzi schemes, pump and dump, front-running, insider trading, and just plain stealing customer assets. All of those were known before 1900. The crypto crowd isn't really that innovative.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-acti...

Their hope was we could exit before the music stopped (we didn't; we survived, barely, thanks to mostly sheer luck of having closed our B-round weeks before the bubble burst, and managed to pivot and survive with massive cuts). We still hoped we could make it profitable without that, but there was no way we could generate enough revenue to justify the exit we were hoping for, but the proportion of our budget that went to marketing certainly made achieving profitability much harder.

Which is to say that VC's often chase very high-risk ways of getting growth even in cases where they know it's just a question of time before valuations will collapse, because most of them are in the business of producing returns, not sustainable companies, and many of them are "dumb money". It's a tough business. I spend a few years in one, analysing the track records of other funds among other things, and I saw so much stupidity in that dataset.

This is a highly logical approach by VCs simply due to their business model of only needing one hit out of hundreds to make a positive return. Reading a recent article called Why You Shouldn't Join YC [0] was quite illuminating with regards to this fact. It is the ergodicity that kills most startups, which is exactly what VCs capitalize on. Personally, most of the counterarguments in the HN thread do not move me, of course a startup might pivot but they need not do it based on the VCs' insistence.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37869760

And this was when I was actively employed developing crypto finance instruments! Like, I have warned people not to buy the thing I have built because they did not understand it.

It is/was a great playground for modeling different instruments imo, but people don't want to treat it like the back alley casino it is.

If you only reference the SEC's own press releases, you are going to miss the nuance here.

The SEC on its own doesn't get to decide when and how existing securities law applies to cryptocurrencies. Absent a settlement, any action undertaken by the SEC must be decided by a federal court.

Importantly, the SEC has been losing in court. For instance, the SEC, which had been blocking a spot Bitcoin ETF, was told in unequivocal terms by the DC Court of Appeals that its reasons for not allowing the ETF to issue were completely unsound. More pertinent to the question of enforcement: another federal court recently found that exchange-traded Ripple XRP tokens are not securities, with the implication that the SEC does not have jurisdiction to regulate the trading of Ripple XRP tokens on exchanges. If you extrapolate this finding to other cryptocurrencies, the SEC cases against Kraken and Coinbase are on shaky ground.

The fact that the SEC can list so many victories on its website is more a function of how costly it is to fight the SEC in court, rather than being a function of whether the SEC is right in all of its assertions.

There have been too many cases of fraud in the crypto industry, and it's good that the SEC has pursued enforcement against them. There are cases, however, where SEC has gone too far, and continues to go too far—especially in light of the fact that the SEC refuses to set forth clear criteria as to which crypto tokens it considers securities, and which crypto tokens it does not consider securities.

Now that the SEC is going after larger players, we are starting so see more cases actually go to court. If the trend continues, one or more of these cases will end up before the Supreme Court, and we will find out what the actual law is in the United States with regards to which crypto tokens are securities and which ones are not, and whether the SEC does in fact have any jurisdiction at all over the crypto exchanges.

You should not be surprised if after everything is said and done—after we have a Supreme Court opinion—crypto is in fact a special case under US securities law, at least with regards to some tokens.

You should also not be surprised if some of the cases in the list that you reference lose their legal support once the law is clarified by the Supreme Court. In hindsight, some of these SEC enforcement actions may be seen as unfair and unjust.

So we shouldn't be surprised when anything changes, ever, given how much activism we are seeing in courts today. So the question is, how much do the people that actually decide what a law means really like cryptocurrencies? I suspect the only good chance most of those companies have is rely on the court's dislike for government agencies, regardless of what laws say. But as far as I am aware, the good friends of the court tend to be very involved in old banking, and thus they aren't fond of crypto companies either.

So maybe those companies should start lobbying Harlan Crow and his circle of friends.

You mean this case?[1]

No, that's not what the court decided. The setup with Ripple was that institutional investors bought tokens directly from Ripple, and then resold them on an open market. The court ruled that resale of the tokens on the open market did not violate the Howey test because Ripple was not a party to that transaction. But the initial sale to institutional investors is still being litigated. Whether the resale by the institutional investors is a regulated event hasn't been litigated yet.

So this is a token-laundering scheme that may have worked. Or not; the remaining parts of the case go to trial on April 23, 2024.

[1] https://www.nysd.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/2023-07/SE...

"...the Court concludes that Ripple’s Programmatic Sales of XRP did not constitute the offer and sale of investment contracts"

It is not only third party sales that were deemed not to be investment contracts—it was all programmatic sales. As I said, the federal court found that exchange-traded Ripple XRP tokens are not securities.

Also, you should know that the SEC has dropped the remaining charges that were to be tried in April. The next step in the litigation is an appeal of the summary judgement.

So essentially them losing sometimes makes it clearer what is allowed, whether the SEC is actually responsible or not.

Here's a guide they published: https://www.sec.gov/corpfin/framework-investment-contract-an... It summarizes the law.

The SEC obviously will not be publishing a release saying it won't enforce the law according to criteria written to suit cryptocurrency promoters. Its key public mission is investor protection.

> In this guidance, we provide a framework for analyzing whether a digital asset has the characteristics of one particular type of security – an "investment contract."[4] Both the Commission and the federal courts frequently use the "investment contract" analysis to determine whether unique or novel instruments or arrangements, such as digital assets, are securities subject to the federal securities laws.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38414770

Here you go: "A security is a fungible, negotiable financial instrument that represents some type of financial value"

It's not the responsible of enforcement agencies to educate people as to what crimes are. This is like pleading ignorance.

Is that your own definition? Luckily, the SEC is constrained by laws passed by Congress and by Supreme Court precedent—both of which run counter to your definition—and doesn't have the same flexibility that ordinary citizens do when articulating policy.

(1) The term “security” means any note, stock, treasury stock, security future, security-based swap, bond, debenture, evidence of indebtedness, certificate of interest or participation in any profit-sharing agreement, collateral-trust certificate, preorganization certificate or subscription, transferable share, investment contract, voting-trust certificate, certificate of deposit for a security, fractional undivided interest in oil, gas, or other mineral rights, any put, call, straddle, option, or privilege on any security, certificate of deposit, or group or index of securities (including any interest therein or based on the value thereof), or any put, call, straddle, option, or privilege entered into on a national securities exchange relating to foreign currency, or, in general, any interest or instrument commonly known as a “security”, or any certificate of interest or participation in, temporary or interim certificate for, receipt for, guarantee of, or warrant or right to subscribe to or purchase, any of the foregoing.

But the judge in the SEC v. Ripple case found that exchange-traded XRP tokens are not securities; even if you think she is wrong, the fact that she disagrees with the SEC (and with you) is evidence that the answer is in fact not obvious.

With regards to whether Ethereum is a security, even the SEC is unsure. When asked under oath before Congress, the SEC Chair has repeatedly refused to give a direct answer. The commission has also avoided naming Ethereum as a security in any of its crypto exchange lawsuits, while it does name direct Ethereum competitors. If it were obviously a security, why would they name other tokens but not Ethereum?

And what about Bitcoin? The SEC has said unequivocally that it is not a security, but they refuse to say what specifically distinguishes Bitcoin from other tokens. Bitcoin cannot be one-of-a-kind in this regard—what would it take for another token to fall in the same category as Bitcoin?

Clearly, some tokens are not securities! If you cannot specify clear criteria to distinguish between security tokens and non-security tokens, you don't have a valid definition.

The uncertainty about how legislation should be interpreted in the case of novel facts is a fundamental aspect of the business of law and the courts and is not special to cryptocurrency; nor does it indicate special victimization of cryptocurrency practitioners.

Whether or not the crypto industry is victimized or not has nothing to do with my point, which is simply that the SEC has avoided clarifying the difference between security tokens and non-security tokens, while at the same time undertaking aggressive enforcement actions that depend entirely on where that line is drawn. I imagine that you and I agree on this?

> That’s actually not exactly what the decision in the Ripple case says: it says that certain types of transactions are not securities transactions, but some are.

Thank you for pointing that out. I added the qualifier exchange traded when referring to XRP in an attempt to highlight that distinction, but my terminology was imprecise.

As you note, the court identified the transaction as the proper level of analysis, and found that whether or not participants entered into an investment contract depended on the nature of the transaction, not the token.

Implicit in this mode of analysis is that the XRP token is never itself a security; rather, securities laws are implicated when the XRP token is part of an investment contract, where the investment contract is itself a security, but the underlying asset is not.

I would imagine the SEC will be keen to avoid a country-wide precedent should they lose in district courts.

Excellent comment btw. It’s the 201-level analysis vs the 101 that we see in the media of SEC shutting down crypto etc

This is a PR soundbite. Coinbase has milked this one quite extensively. "Woe is us, we're trying to do the right thing but the SEC won't tell us what to do!"

It's not actually accurate.

And when the people responsible for writing become Coinbase's lawyers, not their marketing team, and the rubber hits the road in court, Coinbase says no such thing. This is the actual crux of their complaint, in their own words:

> for many tokens, registering is not possible due to effort involved, or not economically viable.

Coinbase doesn't like the cost of having to register securities for the shitcoin du jour - there's no money to be made.

But the SEC isn't obligated to make a profitable business model for Coinbase.

But it sounds far better to get the crypto club and libertarians up in arms about unhelpful government organizations.

If "missing criteria" is nothing but a PR soundbite, perhaps I missed where the SEC shared that criteria.

> We disagree that the majority of digital assets are securities.

And you seem to miss my point.

Not once in Coinbase's lawsuit did they actually say "We'd love to comply, we just don't know how to".

In fact what they did say was that they knew how to comply, "but the cost and effort makes it not profitable for us".

But because of their PR everyone is latching on to this spin of "we'd love to follow regulation, but we don't know how and no-one will tell us!"

So why didn't they say that in court?

That's not true. "US regulators including the SEC agree that Bitcoin, which is by far the largest digital asset, isn't a security."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/06/09/why-crypt...

The big unanswered question is whether they consider Ethereum to be one.

> Not once in Coinbase's lawsuit did they actually say "We'd love to comply, we just don't know how to".

They seem to say that pretty explicitly on Page 14 of their Wells submission.

https://assets.ctfassets.net/c5bd0wqjc7v0/2pW56ln6rPJ7koLHlu...

> In fact what they did say was that they knew how to comply, "but the cost and effort makes it not profitable for us".

I don't see anywhere where they said that.

> So why didn't they say that in court?

They did say that in court.

"For years, Coinbase has voluntarily submitted to regulation by multiple overlapping regulatory bodies, has adhered to the public and limited formal guidance from the SEC, senior SEC Staff, and the courts about the application of securities law to its industry, and has begged the SEC for guidance about how it thinks the federal securities laws map onto the digital asset industry as the SEC’s actions reflected an escalating but undisclosed change in its own view of its authority."

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.59...

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10115990-fools-as-it-has-lo...

A smarter strategy would be to do what the US Justice dept is doing; co-opt the biggest players, install plants, and cut down any upstarts. Government enforced monopolies have worked for hundreds of years as an effective way to control industries.

To make this palatable to the American public, those whistleblower rewards are not courtesy of the taxpayer; they’re courtesy of money seized from previous Bond villains. A portion of Binance’s settlement(s) will go to pay the whistleblowers at the next Bond villain. It’s a circle of life.

That is why it is so prevalent everywhere in the US.

The feds use it too, extensively.

OP was suggesting that the SEC ramp up the rate of actions, which will need funding (at least, initially). I don't see Congress doing that?

I base this entirely on the trackrecord of the SEC and the market.

Now, to wait for someone to argue that PFOF and Dark Pool trading is "fair".

They should stop just short of regulating the underlying cryptocurrencies themselves. Just treat these institutions like they're banks.

The problem with not regulating a currency at all, is that it implies a permission for someone to print it at will. Cryptocurrency is no exception to this scenario; you are asked to trust the developers (technocracy) and node operators (50%+1 attack and all the usual power dynamics of the rich having more say than the majority) to not do it. The most important question you must ask yourself is, how long will the interests of that elite continue to align with yours (if they ever did).

The dream of a decentralized, community-run, grassroots infrastructure died sometime around the first GPU PoC - Satoshi themselves expressed discontent, saying GPUs would trivially out-mine the common man.

Communities can self-regulate because they run on trust; it's extremely difficult to build trust in a system designed around distrusting every single one of your peers.

As for the developers, they could write code to print a billion bitcoins if they wanted to, but for it to take effect everyone's gotta agree to run it.

Holdouts will find that old-coin transactions never succeed, and will have no other choice except to walk away in financial ruin.

1) Removing the attacker directly (PoS) / changing the hashing algorithm to remove the attacker (PoW)

or

2) Submitting to the whims of the attacker

it would be a no-brainer to just remove the attacker. Embracing an attacker-controlled chain seems like a strictly worse option than removing the attacker, no matter how messy. It seems like a choice between disruption or certain ruin.

An attacker at that scale would certainly understand this game theory, and realize that if they attack, after some potentially very messy shake-out and serious temporary disruption, they will soon have no influence over the chain anymore.

What made crypto big was making trading approachable to the common man, mostly through sophisticated loan systems.

Not a problem. This is determined by code in ways everyone can see and understand. It's actually better than governments printing money whenever they feel like it.

The economic impact of money printing is actually minimal. Most inflation is actually generated by fractional reserve banking and their loans which is already something exchanges do. BTC maxis don't seem to grasp this fact.

> you are asked to trust the developers (technocracy)

You are asked to trust code. Either way I'm actually OK with this. I actually trust them a whole lot more than the communists in charge of my country's economy right now.

> node operators (50%+1 attack and all the usual power dynamics of the rich having more say than the majority)

The only problem with this is it turned out cryptocurrency mining is not actually as decentralized as it was supposed to be. It should have been one CPU one vote but it turned into massive operations involving custom hardware.

New cryptocurrencies need technology to fix that problem. Monero uses ASIC resistant proof of work algorithms to mitigate it.

> The dream of a decentralized, community-run, grassroots infrastructure died sometime around the first GPU PoC - Satoshi themselves expressed discontent, saying GPUs would trivially out-mine the common man.

Exactly. That's the true tragedy of cryptocurrencies.

That's just a slightly more wordy way of saying "technocracy". An overwhelming majority of people in the world (including cryptocurrency enthusiasts) are incapable of following through a fizzbuzz program, let alone an SHA256 implementation, and the hash algorithm is barely the tiniest building block.

> Monero uses ASIC resistant proof of work algorithms to mitigate it.

Proof of waste stopped being sexy the moment we realized the environmental impact, and continuing to defend it on any "practical" merits is shortsighted at best.

> Exactly. That's the true tragedy of cryptocurrencies.

With all of your doubling down on technocracy, I find it odd that you defend a concept that, by design, began falling apart as soon as it started gaining traction. The original idea was noble, but it was almost meant to be perverted. What we should have done was to get back to the drawing board: how can we build distributed/decentralized infrastructure that actually helps people.

So? It's still more open than traditional finance. You can actually see how it works if you try. Unlike some central bank's political machinations at some abstract far away place. We need exactly one guarantee: that nobody can change how the system works to benefit themselves.

Besides... The overwhelming majority of people do not even understand the nature of money itself. They do not understand fractional reserve banking. Most people think inflation is caused by the government printing money. Somehow that's not an argument against having money.

> Proof of waste stopped being sexy the moment we realized the environmental impact

Not this nonsense again. Even at the peak of the last bullrun, it didn't even amount to 1% of global energy consumption.

> The original idea was noble, but it was almost meant to be perverted.

I agree it was a noble idea and that it failed. I disagree that it was "meant" to be perverted.

> What we should have done was to get back to the drawing board: how can we build distributed/decentralized infrastructure that actually helps people.

Agree. At this moment in time, I think Monero is closest to that ideal. I am not opposed to even better and more decentralized technology. Ethereum's zero knowledge proofs are very interesting.

You can also see how those work, it's just that they're boring.

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/govcdec/mopo/html/index.en.h...

> They do not understand fractional reserve banking

Entertainingly the crypto people managed to immediately re-invent it, in several different forms, because it turns out to be inextricable from the concept of credit.

Credit has pretty much existed in humans decided to settle down and plant crops. What exactly are you planning to replace the last 10,000 years with?

Getting close to 1% of global electricity consumption to do a piddling quantity of transactions is a massive amount of waste. This is, like, 5 orders of magnitude or worse less efficient than normal banking networks, or about the same usage as all televisions.

When you put it in these terms, we should also just de-regulate fuel, plumbing, and electronics, because the combined lead poisoning won't kill as much as 1% of the population.

To me you all seen plenty happy to buy made in China computers to post your environmentalist takes with and it makes it really hard to take any of it seriously. Maybe after the world is done taking care of the truly impactful stuff we can revisit this proof of work debate.

Proof of work generates not as much wasteful byproducts, but far more relative to its current utility. Not its potential or idealized utility, but for what it gives now.

The cost-benefit on those two examples are at vastly different sides of the spectrum.

And your argument that because of that, we can't take claims about proof of work seriously doesn't hold muster. We can still do things about it. Just like we can still do something about the fountains at the Kardashian homes just being fresh running water (they were annoyed about the cleaning process, so had the bright idea to just install a drain and have the fountains be an open tap, so one of their homes was using 1/2 million gallons a month of water).

Ironically, to you, that's a drop in the ocean and we should let them do it because it doesn't move the needle.

Seems to me like gambling, speculation, and proof of waste all perfectly fit the definition of "comfort and privilege".

> Maybe after the world is done taking care of the truly impactful stuff we can revisit this proof of work debate.

It's crazy how much we can agree on!

The only problem is, PoW is considered harmful even by the larger crypto community, to the point where alternatives were not only considered, but also implemented (e.g. PoS). I'm more than willing to reconsider PoW's merits at a later time (as you suggest), under the condition that all ongoing PoW schemes are paused until we're done dealing with these more important things. I think it's a perfectly reasonable compromise.

I have nothing against proof of stake, I think it's fine but inherently less decentralized than proof of work. The whole idea was that anyone with a computer could participate and be rewarded for contributing to the decentralization of the network. In order to actually participate in ETH proof of stake validation, you need to own 32 ETH. That excludes vast amounts of people including myself.

It's a tradeoff and I'm not entirely sure it's worth it. Compared to the current status quo of huge centralized BTC mining operations it certainly looks attractive. There are better proof of work implementations though like Monero which better guarantee 1 CPU = 1 vote. I'm not ready to write it off yet.

> I think it's a perfectly reasonable compromise.

I don't accept that compromise.

Proof of Coverage was an interesting form of POW, and had the advantage of doing something -potentially- useful with relatively low power consumption. [1]

[0] - Life things happened alongside delays on getting the actual 'miner' so... IDK where it is now. oops.

[1] - The odd question I never quite got far enough in the setup to ask myself was whether this was, in and of itself, a bizarre side-step around reselling internet services.

That's the goal, to remove intermediaries and trust.

There are permissionless and trustless application, but HN likes to use centralized scams like FTX to dunk on crypto and feel smug.

It'd be like me pointing to bernie madoff and saying "see, I told you all of the stock market was a scam!"

You are talking about a fringe minority or crypto transactions. everyone else is talking about the reality on the ground.

This is the libertarian version of "true communism has never been tried". Of course people wanted to reinvent the financial system, it was profitable to do so.

The tragedy is nobody's actually using it because everyone's too busy feeding their money into literal banks and speculating with it.

To borrow a phrase: Nice idea, wrong species.

The libertarian ideology, like many others, is at best an extraordinarily naive interpretation of the individual and the world.

Most people have no use for that, or speculation upon that, and just want a money that's simple, easy, fast, and reliable.

A decade after bitcoin, no-one but crooks and when-moon fanboys use it. Contrast that with AI: the moment it hit the retail market every man and his dog is using it for everything.

https://solanapay.com/

To the layman, a single unfamiliar word or concept equals "my money will disappear".

It's ironic. Cryptocurrency was supposed to put an end to guys like that by ending the need for banks.

The whole problem here is people reinvented the entire financial system on top of it. Exchanges are really just banks in disguise. They do fractional reserve banking, they offer cryptocurrency loans, they even have savings accounts.

The whole problem is that some of what they do adds value, because it turns out the banking industry as a whole has some valuable functions that people need.

The problem is that developers see "this cryptosystem supports smart contracts" and interpret it as "this is a Turing-machine substrate which I can use to deploy effectively centralized / trust-us infrastructure, but then turn around and market it as being decentralized and zero-trust."

If a cryptosystem supports "smart contracts", ideally they should be restricted to only to serve as an interface for extending the deployed cryptosystem with additional decentralized / zero-trust features. Sadly, it's impossible to have a compiler determine whether your code is decentralized / zero-trust.

It's the same reason we keep our money in banks instead of everyone owning a Fed terminal and requesting ACH pulls.

Ultimately there has to be an off-ramp, or it's no different from an ingame currency.

Not if people start using the cryptocurrency to actually pay for stuff. That's the point of money, after all.

How is crypto going to ensure the landscaper actually cuts my grass. I have to have some measure of trust and there has to be infrastructure to resolve disputes and try to make people whole. Once you have that, you are in many ways back at fiat currency.

I've also argued that we already have workable digital currency for regular consumer transactions. I pay my landscaper with Zelle. Who cares that it's denominated in dollars? Point is I can already move money practically wherever I want with the click of a button. And that money is already accepted by everyone I transact with.

Crypto is a solution looking for a problem. And money laundering/crime ended up being the problem they ended up solving. I'm enjoying watching this space slowly grind down / burn to the ground. Good riddance to a level of evil where the perps joke about the fact they're making money helping criminals "they're here for the crime" etc. 18 months is too little time in prison.

That's more than crypto offers me.

Same way cash ensured that. People generally don't pay until the service is done.

So maybe, just maybe crypto is actually not very good as money, which is why people have been increasingly desperate to invent new stories to keep someone paying real money for crypto (digital gold, NFTs, etc.)

Frankly, it works well, but it's not user-friendly for non-technical users still.

And plenty of people take a far more negative view of crypto.

“caveat emptor” is a very poor society wide model.

And escrow isn't really escrow (in the sense of independently verified), but honor based? At least based on the FAQ.

Since things like 'USD arrived in a bank account' can't be verified by a third party.

So, seriously - what's the point?

Regarding code, there have been attempts by people to take over p2p protocols before. Most famous was Justin Suns takeover of Steem. Since all the code was open source, most of the community forked the code over to Hive successfully. If a malicious actor tried something similar with Bisq, the community would just fork an older version of the code.

More fundamentally, these protocols work because people are incentivized to make them work. It’s quite different than the vc crypto with the big marketing budgets that most people hear about; most of those are just traditional finance reskinning itself.

The fraud that scam bank man fraud got sentenced for was plain old theft. Taking customers assets (mainly crypto assets) and using it as his personal piggy bank.

Of course, just as most of yesterday's crypto experts are today's AI experts, the main wastage seems to be moving towards LLMs these days.

In contrast, switching off all crypto farms would be a free reduction in emissions, and indirectly save lives.

My only objection to it is the fact all that energy is being poured into obsolete technology like bitcoin. I wouldn't even mind if Monero used even more energy. That energy is buying us something: a true cryptocurrency.

If we accept the analogy, 0.5% of the oceans is 5 100 000 km³, which is quite a bit more than "a literal drop": https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=0.5%25+of+the+volume+of...

This is self-evidently insane.

I want to ask rhetorically if you are out of your mind but, like I said, it’s self evident.

There are various illegal parts: Creating a currency for example. But even if one can walk around the definition of a currency, exchanging it for dollars is most probably questionable: You give banknotes to someone in exchange for a token which you don’t know how it was obtained. In most cases, it is facilitating drug exchange and hitmen, so, unless one can prove where a Bitcoin comes from, I’m surprised it is even legal to exchange it for tender money.

The whole thing should have been sued from the start.

Shouldn't be illegal.

> exchanging it for dollars

Shouldn't be illegal.

> You give banknotes to someone in exchange for a token which you don’t know how it was obtained.

It doesn't matter how it was obtained.

> In most cases, it is facilitating drug exchange and hitmen

Oh... Just like USD then.

Why don't you go after them for those crimes? Without coopting us into your warrantless global surveillance network?

> unless one can prove where a Bitcoin comes from

That it is even possible to prove that is actually a failure of bitcoin's design. Thankfully Monero fixed it. Money should be fungible. There should be no dirty/clean bit attached to coins.

Here's a clue: one of those is hard to do and massively increases your risk of being caught, and the other actually enables further criminal activity which would not otherwise be easily possible.

So no, not just like USD.

> Shouldn't be illegal.

This is exactly where the bullshit should stop. Creating currencies should be the sole privilege of sovereign governments.

Except this isn’t even remotely true? Less than 1% or so of transactions are even remotely linked to crime?

https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1925

""" ...Binance willfully failed to report well over 100,000 suspicious transactions that it processed as a result of its deficient controls, including transactions involving terrorist organizations, ransomware, child sexual exploitation material, frauds, and scams.

Terrorist Financing. Binance failed to report to FinCEN transactions associated with terrorist groups including Al Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

Ransomware. Despite being one of the largest receivers of ransomware proceeds, and transacting in millions of dollars of ransomware proceeds from attacks involving at least 24 different strains of ransomware, Binance failed to report these transactions.

Child Sexual Abuse Materials. Binance never reported transactions with websites devoted to selling child sexual abuse materials, including Dark Scandals.

Darknet Markets, Scams, and Other Illicit Activity. Despite sending and receiving virtual assets proceeds from large-scale hacks, account takeovers, and darknet markets dealing in illegal narcotics, counterfeit and fraud-related goods and services, as well as other illegal contraband, Binance never reported any such transactions. """

Its the messiness the article speaks about and it mostly works for the few and not the many.

It would be helpful for us to realize that it is that what goverments do like, aka sustain, because the existing power structures rely on it. I am not sure whether "tinking about the many" was ever a serious part of bro cultulture.

Odd, that measuring stick of responsibly you use almost sound like a set of laws?

Libertarians when they are on the upswing "No set of rules should be able to bind me.

Libertarians on the downswing "Kill all those that cheated me using the full power of the state!"

Vetoing and shutting down people and countries is a side effect, not the intended effect, of knowing all transactions.

These justifications.

As society, we've decided peoples individual rights can/should be curtailed when they harm others. We will never agree on definition of "harm". But, certainly money can be used for harm. From I pay someone to kill you, to I donate money to group government has labeled "terrorist", to we made profit polluting environment, etc.

Why should we have the inalienable right to exchange goods and services, no matter what the goods and services are?

Why is that an important tenet of a prosperous and free society? It hasn’t ever been one, and we’ve done well so far.

We have given up some of that sovereignty in order to live in a govt. We should ask if giving up the right to free exchange is necessary for the functioning of our society.

please pick the point on that line where my rights should end and I should be submitted to bureaucracy, KYC, etc.

In the case of finance, it is easier and more effective to delegate the bankers to keep tabs on who is moving (large sums of) money around and refuse service to anyone that seems suspicious. With regards to email providers, no similar nexus exists.

You can best believe that if email providers were registered and licensed and the issue of people using email to commit crimes were sufficiently pronounced, having them scan all emails for suspicious activity would be seriously considered (and there would be a good argument for it).

The value that your currency holds while you own it is based on the current market rate and is inherently tied to everyone of the currency owners. (It is true that yes, other commodities also work via market forces, but they're inherently different as they aren't abstractions and have inherent value to them.)

To not get into the weeds, your rights end when your actions start to affect other people, so limitations on how currency can be used are put in place. Using a shared currency is a type of social contract that you bind yourself when using it. Society has over the years observed how shared currencies work and set limits on the freedom of use to limit abuse.

And to drive the point home, governments have seen that cryptocurrencies are used for abuse, so they're making steps that limit your rights to exchange their currency directly to crypto to inherently decouple their currencies value from their currency.

To get around this, you'll have to convince your employer to pay you in commodities and you to sell your physical items via cryptocurrency. Like how traditional currencies were originally designed to do. The market for exchanging physical goods or other services set the rate for a currency. But unfortunately the inherent unregulated nature of crypto made it ripe for abuse, also the unregulated and rampant speculation of the value made it infeasible to use as a traditional currency.

TL;DR: Currency is a type of social contract, your rights end when your actions start to affect other people negatively.

One is when you knowingly become a broker that sits between the two parties.

"Terrorist Financing. Binance failed to report to FinCEN transactions associated with terrorist groups including Al Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

Ransomware. Despite being one of the largest receivers of ransomware proceeds, and transacting in millions of dollars of ransomware proceeds from attacks involving at least 24 different strains of ransomware, Binance failed to report these transactions.

Child Sexual Abuse Materials. Binance never reported transactions with websites devoted to selling child sexual abuse materials, including Dark Scandals."