What crackdown? The SEC has only charged actual scammers and they’ve “requested information” from the legitimate players to figure out how to proceed. Other than some bad calls by sanctioning software, there’s hardly been anything considered a “crackdown.”
That means, in Republican speak, that they will allow anyone to scam anyone without repercussion.
Republicans love a good scam
Next up is the dismantling of the ACA. They will roll out these amazingly cheap alternatives. Health insurance for $10 a month!
So the poor and the stupid will sign up. They’ll go to the bar and saunter up to a “libtard” and tell them that trump fixed everything.
Then when they get sick and try to use MAGA super plan plus premium they won’t be able to find a doctor. The $10/month plan only covers an annual trip to a CVS minute clinic. They’ll go on Facebook and write up how the goddamn liberals tricked him. Other faithful republicans will pray for them and tell them that it must be a glitch because trump made things better.
The con will win because it’ll only hurt those without power.
I don’t know why this is being taken at face value with so many upvotes. The Gensler SEC was right to go after actual scammers and ponzis, but they went much further and clearly had an agenda.
Gensler targeted the most reputable exchange in the US alleging that their core business is illegal, because the Gensler SEC decided to classify crypto assets as securities rather than define a new regulatory framework that actually fits.
https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023-102
Coinbase wanted to follow the rules and spent years asking for clarity. Rather than provide clear rules, the SEC provided a lawsuit.
There wasn’t a need to “define a new regulatory framework that actually fits” because, funnily enough, the existing regulatory framework already fits. It turns out, inventing new words doesn’t actually change the fundamental nature of the thing you’re describing. Refusing to call something an “investment” doesn’t change the fact that you’re selling an investment, refusing to call something a “security” doesn’t prevent it from being a security if it meets the definition.
Edit: Sorry, let me address that ridiculous point about Coinbase “asking for clarity” directly. Yes, Coinbase repeatedly “asked for clarity” in the same manner as a dude in a girl’s DMs repeatedly asking for nudes while being told in the bluntest of terms to fuck off. They were given perfectly clear answers, they just didn’t like them, so they kept claiming, with zero fucking basis, that these will laid out rules that every financial institution has been following for decades were somehow “unclear” to them. It was a conversation not unlike a Sovereign Citizen trying to get out of a speeding ticket by claiming that they don’t understand where the officer’s authority comes from. The law is prefectly clear. If you don’t understand the law, you hire a lawyer who does. That’s a cost of doing business. Sticking “smart” in front the of the word “contract” doesn’t suddenly invent a whole new field of law. I can’t suddenly get away with murder because I call it “crypto murder”. The law is based on what you do, not what you call it.
wouldn’t a security/investment require a fundamental book value?
An investment contract exists if there is an “investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others.”
And just to be absolutely clear, many cryptocurrencies do not qualify as investments, and the government agrees. However there are numerous other regulations that the crypto industry apparently cannot handle, such as “Know Your Client” laws, which all financial institutions have to abide by, and which exist to prevent money laundering (Binance’s internal emails revealed that they knew perfectly well that their clients were using their service to facilitate crime, and they were perfectly happy with that).
These are not bad faith regulations. They exist for good reasons, and there is absolute no good reason why the crypto industry shouldn’t also be subject to them. If these are currencies they should be regulated like currencies. If they are investments they should be regulated like investments.
Coiners: “We want to be taken seriously and treated as legitimate businesses!”
Biden Government: “OK. We’ll treat you as legitimate businesses in your respective fields and expect you to comply with the same regulations everyone else has to.”
Coiners: “Oh shit wait no this sucks, our whole business model only works because of crime, quick everyone vote for a fascist conman!”
Obligatory Line Goes Up video, although not exclusively about Bitcoin.
I do admit that early in Bitcoin’s life, around 2013, i was a interested in Bitcoin as an alternative to banking, but the volatility and speculation alienated me from the community. Anyone buying BTC now for $90k, you need to realize this turned into a pyramid scheme and you’re not at the top of it. You may be able to find someone who’s more of a sucker to take the Bitcoin off your hand and make a profit, but it’s not sustainable, someone has to loose. Any gains you make are probably less than 10% what the person made by selling it to you.
If you do end up speculating on crypto, don’t invest more than you can afford to loose, and assume you’ll loose it all. It’s very likely you’ll either get hacked/scammed, loose your wallet, leave your wallet in an online exchange who runs off with your keys, etc. You’re on your own if that happens. If you do end up making any profit, it’ll be a blessing and you’ll be way happier than if you thought this would be your key to get rich, and you end up loosing it all.
The system where everybody loses is fiat money, because the money always loses value. Bitcoin is the opposite.
Yes, the line keeps going up. I don’t understand why people think this is some kind of own. That longass video just gets funnier and more irrelevant as it gets older.
And the picture is about NFTs… At worst they’re like collector plates. Just another grift. Who cares? People buying jpegs of monkeys is not a real problem for me.
Every time the price spikes I get the feeling its large holders cashing out while they can and the liquid from newcomers is available. Which would make it mostly a scam, kinda like the stock market but even more shallow somehow, as if the stock market wasn’t unrelated enough to actual production and very esoteric.
It really depends on the community you’re talking with. In the Bitcoin community that would not surprise me in the least if it’s just big holders dumping on little holders to cash out for fiat. In the Monero community however that’s totally different because they want to use it as actual money. They, and I include myself in this category, believe that the government should absolutely not have control of our money supply that they can manipulate at any time for any reason or no reason at all and make everyone less wealthy, with the exception of those who they choose to give “government contracts”, “incentives” or “subsidies”. This is why the libertarians say that taxation is theft because they tax you on your productive hours of your life and call it an income tax and then they give it to the people who they choose to flatter and leave you homeless and shit.
I’m sorry, no. The point when you find yourself relating to libertarians is the time you should really ask yourself two simple questions
1 - Am I a dumbass?
2 - Why am I trying to herd myself in with a group of dumbasses?
And that’s why we are different people. I have my opinion and you have yours. You’re not going to change my mind and I’m not going to change yours and we both already know that.
ok but why not gold or silver then? also obviously without currency controls all modern countries would have drastically smaller economies.
The settlement time. Gold and silver don’t work well as currency if you need to settle over long distances quickly. So like I cannot send Amazon and ounce of silver to buy a product easily. But I can send them Monero with a few clicks of my keyboard. Almost instantaneously. Lynn Alden, who is an economist, basically says that the invention of the telegraph broke gold and silver as money, because transactions could happen at the speed of light, but settlement could still take weeks, especially if, say, the United States was paying, I don’t know, the UK or something.
You can believe that all you want, but this is an even nutter dream than achieving effective gun control in the US (one of my nutty dreams). Why in the world would the government ever give up control of the “money supply”? That’s not going to happen.
Oh, they’re absolutely not going to give it up. That’s for sure. But as a citizen, you can just stop using it as much as you can in your day-to-day life. You can’t avoid using it entirely in most cases, but you can tone down how much you use it pretty significantly. And that they cannot control.
Income taxes go back into services that help society. How do you expect a government to fund any of the infrastructure and services that you take for granted around you without it?
some areas do fine without income taxes. plenty of other types of taxes.
Name one
Cayman Islands, UAE, Bahamas, Monaco, Bermuda, Qatar, Bahrain, Brunei, Oman, Kuwait, British Virgin Islands, Panama, Saudi Arabia, Anguilla, Somalia… There’s more, but you only asked for one. I will admit that doing fine is a relative term and probably doesn’t apply to all these places. 😂
First off, we have to agree that we need the government in order to fund infrastructure. If we make that assumption, then sales tax on anything other than food and base essentials.
Lower income people spend - as a proportion of their income - far more of their income than higher income people. This makes the “nothing but sales taxes” approach much more regressive than it initially seems, despite often being touted by economists as a progressive approach to taxation.
Right, but a lot of lower-income people also spend a lot more of their income that they do get on base essentials, such as food, clothing, and housing, which would be considered base essentials and therefore not have sales tax. So your box of pasta would not have sales tax, but your new flat screen TV would. Reason being, the box of pasta will let you survive. But you cannot eat your flat screen TV.
You’re missing the fact that a flatscreen TV will still often represent - as a portion of someone’s wealth - a far greater cost than a private jet would to a billionaire. Consider that most low income people are getting their cell phones on payment plans, whereas a multimillionaire can afford to buy a Lamborghini Gellardo out of pocket. On top of that, high end purchases like cars, yachts, houses, fine art, etc, often retain a lot of their resale value, turning them into investments in many cases, often reselling for more than their purchase price. So yes, I absolutely did account for the tax exemptions on “essentials”, and even when you factor those your sales tax only model still ends up being less onerous the more wealthy someone is.
I also want to call out the unspoken implication that is often present with these theories - not accusing you of doing this, but it needs to be said - that items like phones, computers and TVs are extraneous luxuries that no poor person should ever own, as if enjoying a fulfilling life or engaging in relaxation are things that only the wealthy should be allowed to have access to.
Thanks for pointing that out. I am definitely not saying that poor people should not have access to flat screen TVs and phones, etc. Because, especially with computing hardware, those kinds of things can very easily lift somebody out of poverty due to greater access to information and opportunities. However, I often see people struggling to afford basic necessities, and yet they have the newest iPhone every year or every other year, which is incredibly financially irresponsible.
