> It’s conversely not great to have consumers not using their brains, applying zero scrutiny, and buying into whatever the new street fad is then wailing for th

> It’s conversely not great to have consumers not using their brains, applying zero scrutiny, and buying into whatever the new street fad is then wailing for the Uncle SEC when their little crypto tokens became worthless. I disagree. A few centuries of experience make it pretty clear that there's a spectrum between highly regulated markets and unregulated markets. The highly regulated markets are a social good and beloved by both investors and people running actual decent businesses, because they enable effective matching between spare capital and the places where it can be effectively deployed. So I think it's great that most investors feel safe enough to invest in things. It makes the world better. Think of it like the market for food. You can walk into pretty much any store in the US, buy pretty much any packaged food item, and safely eat it. Is it bad that you aren't applying your whole intellect to decide whether that muffin is safe? I'd say no, it's in fact good that you don't have to think about it. But that's only enabled by some pretty intense regulation on food. Some would argue that it's interfering in the marketplace to keep people from selling shoddy discount food, and that we should just let the invisible hand work it out. That people "wailing" when they start throwing up is just them being crybabies, and that they should caveat emptor harder if they don't like blood in their stool. But I think free market fundamentalists like that are deranged. I think markets exist to help fulfill human purposes, and that we should minimize the extent to which scammers, jerks, and monsters can parasitize them. And I think that for all the hue and cry about "innovation" in the cryptowhatever space, I've seen very little that's actually a significant socially positive improvement. In contrast, over the same period that Bitcoin has done approximately nothing useful, we've seen things from M-Pesa to Venmo actually serve millions and millions on a regular basis.