4 ms·

This is a blatant, completely shameless and very aggressive character assassination campaign, to manufacture consent for a heavy handed response against users o

This is a blatant, completely shameless and very aggressive character assassination campaign, to manufacture consent for a heavy handed response against users of cryptocurrencies, going as far as regulatory restrictions on what code we can run on our computing devices. "Securities fraud" here characterizes offering members of the public investment contracts without the approval of a centralized regulatory gatekeeper - something which typically requires a company to have annual revenue exceeding $100 million. That is of course not actually "fraud" under any reasonable definition of the term. It's regulatory-speak, to mislead the public and make these restrictions sound reasonable.

weego 4y ago
This is a blatant, completely shameless and very aggressive character assassination campaign And yet all of the specific details are presented with decent context and are easily verifiable, something I'm sure you are very much in favour of. If it's damming and objectively true, maybe the problem is not that the words are being said. On another note, the ease at which VCs have inserted themselves into, and have been accepted as part of, the crypto scene and supposed future is both amusing and scary to me. They might not be a Govt entity, but they also play by a set of less formal rules that do not benefit anyone but the closed group they choose said rules to benefit.
- CryptoPunk 4y ago
  >>And yet all of the specific details are presented with decent context and are easily verifiable, something I'm sure you a very much in favour of. That doesn't detract from the fact that the headline, which is the only part of the article many will read, is inflammatory and misleading. >>They might not be a Govt entity, but they also play by a set of less formal rules that do not benefit anyone but the closed group they choose said rules to be edit. VCs took center stage in the crypto space because the SEC entered it and prohibited programmatic crowdsales whereby the public could participate in initial funding rounds. There is literally no other legal avenue by which people can raise funds for cryptocurrency projects, and those methods being explored as possible alternatives, like NFT sales, are already being eyed by the SEC with a mind to ban them. And if Congress gives the SEC the power to do so, they will. Ethereum, had it conducted its capital raising after 2018, would have had to rely on venture capital firms, instead of a public crowdsale like it conducted in 2014 that provided it with wide distribution of token holders.
  - em500 4y ago
    The SEC was founded in 1934 in response to "crowdfunding" scams in the decades prior. The reason that cryptocurrency, NFT, etc are being eyed by the SEC is that the people involved are involved in selling nebulous assets of questionable value to the public at large. The SEC cares a lot less if they're content with scamming friends&family or rich fools ("qualified investors"). The fact that what's being sold are numbers generated on a computer is not the most relevant factor, and does not not warrant a different treatment than say titles of Florida swamp land.
    - CryptoPunk 4y ago
      And lockdowns were instituted in 2020, in response to the spread of the coronavirus. They have been found to have caused something on the order of 141 times more damage than they mitigated: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.1976051 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.19... The idea that we ought to impose blanket restrictions on millions of people, and thereby sacrifice their liberty, in the name of safety, is fundamentally misguided in my opinion, and certain goes against the core principles of liberal society. Liberal democracies have to find more rights-respecting ways to combat financial crime. Yes we know preemptively restricting financial interaction reduces some forms of financial harm, but what kind of damage does it do to society, when the only business entities capable of directly soliciting the public for capital, are those with revenues of over $100 million a year? What does that do to income inequality? I don't like people promising the moon to hype up speculative investments, but there are non-government solutions to this, like reputation markets. In fact we saw these non-government solutions working already: token investors in 2018, at the end of the brief period of reprieve from SEC restrictions, between 2016 and 2018, were unrecognizable from those that were giving a website with a white paper $40 million worth of cryptocurrency in 2016. This transformation occurred completely independently from any regulatory action. The collective intelligence of the market increased from hard-won lessons in the need to do due diligence, and the emergence of numerous sites for rating token sales (mind you, there was still a lot of room improvement in the curation market when the token sale experiment was shut down by the SEC. One promising avenue was Vitalik Buterin's proposal for DAICOs: https://ethresear.ch/t/explanation-of-daicos/465 https://ethresear.ch/t/explanation-of-daicos/465 which the market did not survive long enough to test). Regulations can obviously address some of these problems too, but any restriction on how consenting parties choose to interact is going to have massive unintended consequences, and in my estimation the unintended consequences do much more harm than what's alleviated by the regulations. Also worth mentioning is that the regulations that the SEC imposed on token sales went far beyond prohibiting issuers from promising big gains. They micromanaged how offerings were conducted, with inflexible cookie cutter rules that inhibit innovation and make the entire market dependent on a centralized gatekeeper, which is a monopolistic and fragile situation prone to systemic failures. One significant effect of this was that they eliminated the entire retail market's access to the early stage venture capital market. It's obvious to me that a free society should not tolerate this level of control being exerted on how people engage in voluntary interactions with other consenting adults. >>The fact that what's being sold are numbers generated on a computer is not the most relevant factor, and does not not warrant a different treatment than say titles of Florida swamp land. The fact that an investment offer required having a title to a swamp in the 1930s made it so it was less evident how illiberal laws that the SEC enforces stifle society. Now that any one with a computer can create digital art and offer it up as an investment on a programmatic contract system makes it clear that the laws passed in the 1930s, if maintained, are going to require increasingly draconian intrusions into private interaction to enforce. Similar to how if we as a society tried to continue enforcing obscenity laws into the internet age: effective enforcement would have required prohibiting public access to strong encryption, and heavy handed treatment of those found flouting the law, to make an example out of them for every one else.
specialist 4y ago
Yup. If society persecutes web3, NFTs, and other technocults, there's no telling where the madness will stop. MLMs, televangelists, condo timeshares, penny stocks. No grift scheme will be safe from the nanny state.
- CryptoPunk 4y ago
  Web3 is you being able to effect a transaction from your own browser, without any one else's permission. Calling that a 'cult' and advocating persecution of people using such technology, or working towards making it more usable, is pathological. Web3 really reveals the pathological malevolence at the heart of the regulatory state and its anti-libertarian apologists. And what you advocate would be dystopian. Now that any one with a computer can create digital art and offer it up as an investment on a programmatic contract systemm, it is clear that the laws passed in the 1930s, if maintained, are going to require increasingly draconian intrusions into private interaction to enforce. Similar to how if we as a society tried to continue enforcing obscenity laws into the internet age: effective enforcement would have required prohibiting public access to strong encryption, and heavy handed treatment of those found flouting the law, to make an example out of them for every one else.

weego 4y ago

This is a blatant, completely shameless and very aggressive character assassination campaign And yet all of the specific details are presented with decent context and are easily verifiable, something I'm sure you are very much in favour of. If it's damming and objectively true, maybe the problem is not that the words are being said. On another note, the ease at which VCs have inserted themselves into, and have been accepted as part of, the crypto scene and supposed future is both amusing and scary to me. They might not be a Govt entity, but they also play by a set of less formal rules that do not benefit anyone but the closed group they choose said rules to benefit.

CryptoPunk 4y ago
>>And yet all of the specific details are presented with decent context and are easily verifiable, something I'm sure you a very much in favour of. That doesn't detract from the fact that the headline, which is the only part of the article many will read, is inflammatory and misleading. >>They might not be a Govt entity, but they also play by a set of less formal rules that do not benefit anyone but the closed group they choose said rules to be edit. VCs took center stage in the crypto space because the SEC entered it and prohibited programmatic crowdsales whereby the public could participate in initial funding rounds. There is literally no other legal avenue by which people can raise funds for cryptocurrency projects, and those methods being explored as possible alternatives, like NFT sales, are already being eyed by the SEC with a mind to ban them. And if Congress gives the SEC the power to do so, they will. Ethereum, had it conducted its capital raising after 2018, would have had to rely on venture capital firms, instead of a public crowdsale like it conducted in 2014 that provided it with wide distribution of token holders.
- em500 4y ago
  The SEC was founded in 1934 in response to "crowdfunding" scams in the decades prior. The reason that cryptocurrency, NFT, etc are being eyed by the SEC is that the people involved are involved in selling nebulous assets of questionable value to the public at large. The SEC cares a lot less if they're content with scamming friends&family or rich fools ("qualified investors"). The fact that what's being sold are numbers generated on a computer is not the most relevant factor, and does not not warrant a different treatment than say titles of Florida swamp land.
  - CryptoPunk 4y ago
    And lockdowns were instituted in 2020, in response to the spread of the coronavirus. They have been found to have caused something on the order of 141 times more damage than they mitigated: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.1976051 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.19... The idea that we ought to impose blanket restrictions on millions of people, and thereby sacrifice their liberty, in the name of safety, is fundamentally misguided in my opinion, and certain goes against the core principles of liberal society. Liberal democracies have to find more rights-respecting ways to combat financial crime. Yes we know preemptively restricting financial interaction reduces some forms of financial harm, but what kind of damage does it do to society, when the only business entities capable of directly soliciting the public for capital, are those with revenues of over $100 million a year? What does that do to income inequality? I don't like people promising the moon to hype up speculative investments, but there are non-government solutions to this, like reputation markets. In fact we saw these non-government solutions working already: token investors in 2018, at the end of the brief period of reprieve from SEC restrictions, between 2016 and 2018, were unrecognizable from those that were giving a website with a white paper $40 million worth of cryptocurrency in 2016. This transformation occurred completely independently from any regulatory action. The collective intelligence of the market increased from hard-won lessons in the need to do due diligence, and the emergence of numerous sites for rating token sales (mind you, there was still a lot of room improvement in the curation market when the token sale experiment was shut down by the SEC. One promising avenue was Vitalik Buterin's proposal for DAICOs: https://ethresear.ch/t/explanation-of-daicos/465 https://ethresear.ch/t/explanation-of-daicos/465 which the market did not survive long enough to test). Regulations can obviously address some of these problems too, but any restriction on how consenting parties choose to interact is going to have massive unintended consequences, and in my estimation the unintended consequences do much more harm than what's alleviated by the regulations. Also worth mentioning is that the regulations that the SEC imposed on token sales went far beyond prohibiting issuers from promising big gains. They micromanaged how offerings were conducted, with inflexible cookie cutter rules that inhibit innovation and make the entire market dependent on a centralized gatekeeper, which is a monopolistic and fragile situation prone to systemic failures. One significant effect of this was that they eliminated the entire retail market's access to the early stage venture capital market. It's obvious to me that a free society should not tolerate this level of control being exerted on how people engage in voluntary interactions with other consenting adults. >>The fact that what's being sold are numbers generated on a computer is not the most relevant factor, and does not not warrant a different treatment than say titles of Florida swamp land. The fact that an investment offer required having a title to a swamp in the 1930s made it so it was less evident how illiberal laws that the SEC enforces stifle society. Now that any one with a computer can create digital art and offer it up as an investment on a programmatic contract system makes it clear that the laws passed in the 1930s, if maintained, are going to require increasingly draconian intrusions into private interaction to enforce. Similar to how if we as a society tried to continue enforcing obscenity laws into the internet age: effective enforcement would have required prohibiting public access to strong encryption, and heavy handed treatment of those found flouting the law, to make an example out of them for every one else.

specialist 4y ago

Yup. If society persecutes web3, NFTs, and other technocults, there's no telling where the madness will stop. MLMs, televangelists, condo timeshares, penny stocks. No grift scheme will be safe from the nanny state.

CryptoPunk 4y ago
Web3 is you being able to effect a transaction from your own browser, without any one else's permission. Calling that a 'cult' and advocating persecution of people using such technology, or working towards making it more usable, is pathological. Web3 really reveals the pathological malevolence at the heart of the regulatory state and its anti-libertarian apologists. And what you advocate would be dystopian. Now that any one with a computer can create digital art and offer it up as an investment on a programmatic contract systemm, it is clear that the laws passed in the 1930s, if maintained, are going to require increasingly draconian intrusions into private interaction to enforce. Similar to how if we as a society tried to continue enforcing obscenity laws into the internet age: effective enforcement would have required prohibiting public access to strong encryption, and heavy handed treatment of those found flouting the law, to make an example out of them for every one else.