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Why? Nobody is forcing crypto currenency on anyone. I get that registered companies might have some other deal with the govenment and with hacker organisations,

Why? Nobody is forcing crypto currenency on anyone. I get that registered companies might have some other deal with the govenment and with hacker organisations, but a free and open (and non-country-bound) system should really not be 'managed' by some random organisation in a random country.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dmitrygr 9y ago
Same reason SEC exists. Because many people are easy to manipulate, and plenty of malicious people out there will convince (not force) them to invest in their ICO, etc.
- Jabanga 9y ago
  Then we should limit who people can vote for, since voters are so easy to manipulate into voting against their own interests. The basic principles of liberal democracy assume that a person has an absolute right to make decisions for their own life. These kinds of restrictions are unconscionable restrictions on the right of free people to their personal autonomy.
  - vkou 9y ago
    We aren't allowed to murder people either, but for some reason, most of us don't consider that to be the antithesis of liberal democracy.
    - Jabanga 9y ago
      The basic principle of liberal democracy is that we have an absolute right to personal autonomy unless we violate other people's equal right to the same. Making it illegal to offer a digital token for sale to other consenting adults, without approval from a central authority, is unconscionable. Before endorsing yet another law that restricts our right to engage in voluntary interactions, consider this: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/enforcing-the-law-is-inherently-violent/488828/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/enforci...
      - PKop 9y ago
        These same people disagreeing with you would bend over backwards to decry the war on drugs for the same reasons you're articulating in this case..
      - chowells 9y ago
        You interfere with my right to personal autonomy by bankrupting yourself throwing good money after bad in stupid investments, leaving yourself destitute and in need of additional public services. Or do you also intend to claim that the poor should be allowed to die on the streets as punishment for not being rich?
        Jabanga 9y ago
        No one has a right to force you to support someone who made themselves destitute. You're using one infringement of personal autonomy to justify another.
        ericd 9y ago
        In which case I assume you're of the "taxes are an infringement on freedom" camp of extreme libertarian?
        Jabanga 9y ago
        I don't believe all taxes are an infringement on freedom. A tax on natural resource consumption, and to a lesser extent, immovable property within a state's jurisdiction, can be morally justified in my opinion. I also don't have a problem with a head tax, conditioned on the punishment for noncompliance being exile, rather than imprisonment. A tax on private transactions is an infringement on liberty in my opinion. On that note, it's interesting that the first 'War on Drugs' used taxes on private transactions as its avenue to prohibition. Since the government at the time didn't have the Constitutional authority (this is before the Supreme Court was utterly corrupted by politics) to outright ban drugs, what it did instead is require that all targeted drugs pay a stamp tax, and then simply refuse to issue the stamp. This shows the prohibitive nature of taxes on private transactions.
  - cheetos 9y ago
    There is simply a massive difference between the theory of democracy and its actual implementation. Your personal autonomy is restricted by the government, massively, period, generally for everyone's own good. They decide what and how much medicine you can put in your body. Whether you can gamble, and where, and on what, and how much. What drugs you can take. What speed you can drive. Whether you must go to school or not based on your age. Which food you can buy at the supermarket. What you are allowed to see on television. Where and when you may protest. What behavior is allowed in public and what is not. What speech is considered 'free' and what isn't. What machines you may operate and under what circumstances. Which financial transactions you may or may not participate in and the terms of those transactions. The type of home you build and it's specifications. Which countries you may or may not enter and under which circumstances. Whether you are allowed to work or not. It's just the way things are.
    - stale2002 9y ago
      Yeah, it is just the way thing are. And till now, you had no other option. But it looks like things are changing with regards to finance. Because now, it is going to be much more difficult for the government to regulate your financial activities. The "way things are" is changing, and changing for the better. Don't like it? Then the government can send in its men with guns and attempt to stop it. The technology is getting better and better, though. So it will soon become extremely difficult for those men with guns to do anything at all with your untraceable, untraceable, and unstoppable financial activities. May the best group win. The government will need all the luck it can get.
    - Jabanga 9y ago
      >Your personal autonomy is restricted by the government, massively, period, generally for everyone's own good. They decide what and how much medicine you can put in your body. Whether you can gamble, and where, and on what, and how much. What drugs you can take. What speed you can drive. Whether you must go to school or not based on your age. Which food you can buy at the supermarket. These restrictions violate people's basic rights and are to the material detriment of society at large. The more of a regulatory burden is placed on an industry, the more dysfunctional, bureaucratic and nepotistic it is.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- subverter 9y ago
  Should not the individual be held responsible for making a poor decision? Taking the stance that we should be protected from every possible bad thing that can happen is a recipe for economic disaster. Especially when the one offering such protection is the one that manipulates us the most.
- darawk 9y ago
  Trying to protect everyone all the time from everything quashes innovation. I've lost money in ICOs. I lost money in the DAO, too. I'd lose that money 10x over again to prevent the SEC from squashing this nascent space like this.
taysic 9y ago
I remember after the ethereum flash crash how many people were saying "screw decentralization, I'm getting a lawyer". Those sort of values go out the window when the person who loses, loses a lot. The laws are in place for the benefit of all
- julian_1 9y ago
  The flash crash on GDAX? That was the non-decentralized code of a single exchange executing.
tptacek 9y ago
Is there some way we can just replace these kinds of threads with a link to some canonical thread about why the concept of security laws is fundamentally unjust or unwise? This discussion really has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  This discussion really has nothing to do with the topic at hand. It's possible to veer off-topic in a substantive way. Some of the more interesting HN comments have been spawned that way. Whether subsequent comments will be high-quality depends on the topic and the amount of energy thrown into the conversation, but fresh perspectives are good as long as people are introducing them productively. Threads like this shouldn't be auto-collapsed. One of the main reasons people write quality responses in an off-topic conversation is because it will be seen. Take away the eyeballs and you take away the quality.
- PKop 9y ago
  Then go somewhere else. Why do you get to declare what is valid as discussion or isn't? If people are engaging in the discussion, obviously they value it.
- SolarNet 9y ago
  Because not everyone agrees with you?
  - tptacek 9y ago
    That's an answer to someone's question, but a non-sequitur answer to mine.
    - SolarNet 9y ago
      > with a link to some canonical thread about why the concept of security laws is fundamentally unjust or unwise Because not everyone agrees with that position.
SolarNet 9y ago
The SEC exists to prevent fraud. It's about people having a choice between truthful investments. These companies are allowed to operate as they claim they are with relatively little oversight. What the SEC regulates is a company claiming they will use investment to do X and then the company does Y or keeps it for themselves. Which is also known as fraud. Like the DEA (an example of something unjust), Secret Service, and ATF, the SEC is a specialized branch of law enforcement. What these personal choice fundamentalists forget is that lying is wrong. And when you lie about what you are going to do with someone's money, that's a form of theft, e.g. fraud.
- clarky07 9y ago
  And that's why hundreds of bankers went to jail after the financial crisis. oh wait, no, that didn't happen.
  - SolarNet 9y ago
    Because it was legal. Congress repealed the law that said those actions were illegal and so it wasn't... Checks and balances and all that: elect better representatives.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

dmitrygr 9y ago

Same reason SEC exists. Because many people are easy to manipulate, and plenty of malicious people out there will convince (not force) them to invest in their ICO, etc.

Jabanga 9y ago
Then we should limit who people can vote for, since voters are so easy to manipulate into voting against their own interests. The basic principles of liberal democracy assume that a person has an absolute right to make decisions for their own life. These kinds of restrictions are unconscionable restrictions on the right of free people to their personal autonomy.
- vkou 9y ago
  We aren't allowed to murder people either, but for some reason, most of us don't consider that to be the antithesis of liberal democracy.
  - Jabanga 9y ago
    The basic principle of liberal democracy is that we have an absolute right to personal autonomy unless we violate other people's equal right to the same. Making it illegal to offer a digital token for sale to other consenting adults, without approval from a central authority, is unconscionable. Before endorsing yet another law that restricts our right to engage in voluntary interactions, consider this: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/enforcing-the-law-is-inherently-violent/488828/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/enforci...
    - PKop 9y ago
      These same people disagreeing with you would bend over backwards to decry the war on drugs for the same reasons you're articulating in this case..
    - chowells 9y ago
      You interfere with my right to personal autonomy by bankrupting yourself throwing good money after bad in stupid investments, leaving yourself destitute and in need of additional public services. Or do you also intend to claim that the poor should be allowed to die on the streets as punishment for not being rich?
      - Jabanga 9y ago
        No one has a right to force you to support someone who made themselves destitute. You're using one infringement of personal autonomy to justify another.
        ericd 9y ago
        In which case I assume you're of the "taxes are an infringement on freedom" camp of extreme libertarian?
        Jabanga 9y ago
        I don't believe all taxes are an infringement on freedom. A tax on natural resource consumption, and to a lesser extent, immovable property within a state's jurisdiction, can be morally justified in my opinion. I also don't have a problem with a head tax, conditioned on the punishment for noncompliance being exile, rather than imprisonment. A tax on private transactions is an infringement on liberty in my opinion. On that note, it's interesting that the first 'War on Drugs' used taxes on private transactions as its avenue to prohibition. Since the government at the time didn't have the Constitutional authority (this is before the Supreme Court was utterly corrupted by politics) to outright ban drugs, what it did instead is require that all targeted drugs pay a stamp tax, and then simply refuse to issue the stamp. This shows the prohibitive nature of taxes on private transactions.
- cheetos 9y ago
  There is simply a massive difference between the theory of democracy and its actual implementation. Your personal autonomy is restricted by the government, massively, period, generally for everyone's own good. They decide what and how much medicine you can put in your body. Whether you can gamble, and where, and on what, and how much. What drugs you can take. What speed you can drive. Whether you must go to school or not based on your age. Which food you can buy at the supermarket. What you are allowed to see on television. Where and when you may protest. What behavior is allowed in public and what is not. What speech is considered 'free' and what isn't. What machines you may operate and under what circumstances. Which financial transactions you may or may not participate in and the terms of those transactions. The type of home you build and it's specifications. Which countries you may or may not enter and under which circumstances. Whether you are allowed to work or not. It's just the way things are.
  - stale2002 9y ago
    Yeah, it is just the way thing are. And till now, you had no other option. But it looks like things are changing with regards to finance. Because now, it is going to be much more difficult for the government to regulate your financial activities. The "way things are" is changing, and changing for the better. Don't like it? Then the government can send in its men with guns and attempt to stop it. The technology is getting better and better, though. So it will soon become extremely difficult for those men with guns to do anything at all with your untraceable, untraceable, and unstoppable financial activities. May the best group win. The government will need all the luck it can get.
  - Jabanga 9y ago
    >Your personal autonomy is restricted by the government, massively, period, generally for everyone's own good. They decide what and how much medicine you can put in your body. Whether you can gamble, and where, and on what, and how much. What drugs you can take. What speed you can drive. Whether you must go to school or not based on your age. Which food you can buy at the supermarket. These restrictions violate people's basic rights and are to the material detriment of society at large. The more of a regulatory burden is placed on an industry, the more dysfunctional, bureaucratic and nepotistic it is.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
subverter 9y ago
Should not the individual be held responsible for making a poor decision? Taking the stance that we should be protected from every possible bad thing that can happen is a recipe for economic disaster. Especially when the one offering such protection is the one that manipulates us the most.
darawk 9y ago
Trying to protect everyone all the time from everything quashes innovation. I've lost money in ICOs. I lost money in the DAO, too. I'd lose that money 10x over again to prevent the SEC from squashing this nascent space like this.

taysic 9y ago

I remember after the ethereum flash crash how many people were saying "screw decentralization, I'm getting a lawyer". Those sort of values go out the window when the person who loses, loses a lot. The laws are in place for the benefit of all

julian_1 9y ago
The flash crash on GDAX? That was the non-decentralized code of a single exchange executing.

tptacek 9y ago

Is there some way we can just replace these kinds of threads with a link to some canonical thread about why the concept of security laws is fundamentally unjust or unwise? This discussion really has nothing to do with the topic at hand.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
This discussion really has nothing to do with the topic at hand. It's possible to veer off-topic in a substantive way. Some of the more interesting HN comments have been spawned that way. Whether subsequent comments will be high-quality depends on the topic and the amount of energy thrown into the conversation, but fresh perspectives are good as long as people are introducing them productively. Threads like this shouldn't be auto-collapsed. One of the main reasons people write quality responses in an off-topic conversation is because it will be seen. Take away the eyeballs and you take away the quality.
PKop 9y ago
Then go somewhere else. Why do you get to declare what is valid as discussion or isn't? If people are engaging in the discussion, obviously they value it.
SolarNet 9y ago
Because not everyone agrees with you?
- tptacek 9y ago
  That's an answer to someone's question, but a non-sequitur answer to mine.
  - SolarNet 9y ago
    > with a link to some canonical thread about why the concept of security laws is fundamentally unjust or unwise Because not everyone agrees with that position.

SolarNet 9y ago

The SEC exists to prevent fraud. It's about people having a choice between truthful investments. These companies are allowed to operate as they claim they are with relatively little oversight. What the SEC regulates is a company claiming they will use investment to do X and then the company does Y or keeps it for themselves. Which is also known as fraud. Like the DEA (an example of something unjust), Secret Service, and ATF, the SEC is a specialized branch of law enforcement. What these personal choice fundamentalists forget is that lying is wrong. And when you lie about what you are going to do with someone's money, that's a form of theft, e.g. fraud.

clarky07 9y ago
And that's why hundreds of bankers went to jail after the financial crisis. oh wait, no, that didn't happen.
- SolarNet 9y ago
  Because it was legal. Congress repealed the law that said those actions were illegal and so it wasn't... Checks and balances and all that: elect better representatives.