Ah, so protecting people from scams is now banning people from their own decisions?
I suppose we should drop all laws about fraud really, why should we ban people from freely transacting with "microsoft" support services who just want to help them with their computer?
But banning them from participating in an entire class of financial transactions is not just protecting them from scams. There are token sales that are not scams. It's prohibiting them from entering into legitimate investments that simply don't have government approval (e.g. a securities sale that doesn't ask them for their ID, and thus doesn't meet securities regulations).
At this point there are enough scams to make people cheer for the ban.
Perhaps a better answer would be regulation in a similar way to more traditional IPOs.
>> an securities sale that doesn't ask them for their ID, and thus doesn't meet securities regulations
Perhaps it's just not a good idea to have such a thing?
Or perhaps the seller side of the equation, where you can't run an ICO without being registered and regulated, is needed.
I know, this circumscribes some of the allure of the whole area - that it's free of regulation, that it democratises finance etc etc. But like other avenues in life, perhaps we are being shown why the regulations exists in meatspace in the first place.
BTW I'm not trying to argue that all regulations and government actions are correct and useful, I'm very sympathetic to the idea that we are over-governed and over-regulated, in lots of ways. But perhaps not here.
People support all sorts of things that reduce rights. Doesn't make it okay..
>>Perhaps it's just not a good idea to have such a thing? Or perhaps the seller side of the equation, where you can't run an ICO without being registered and regulated, is needed.
I don't believe we should be limiting other people's right to privacy and to exchange digital tokens (not guns or tanks) under any circumstance.
I think accepting the right of society to impose these limitations on individuals is accepting servility for everyone, and I find that enormously dangerous and harmful.
Cryptocurrency is something people choose to go into knowing it's resistant to regulation by design. If they want to avoid the risks associated with fewer regulations, they can remain in the traditional financial market. But yes we've reached an empasse. We fundamentally don't relate on the issue of a third party essentially dictating to an individual what risks they may subject themselves to.
I think we'll begin to find out how regulation-resistant it is over the next few years...
And no, we don't relate on that, and we disagree that the effect is limited to the individual (see "the Great Depression, causes of") or that the individual should have to bear all risk of their actions at all times. Fundamentally I suspect we disagree on what sort of society we want to live in.
It may be regulation resistant or it may prove to not be. But the point is people go into it with the expectation that it is designed to try to achieve this property, and they're free to avoid any perceived risks of a regulation resistant industry by remaining in the traditional financial market. This greatly reduces the moral justification of imposing regulations on this space.
We also disagree on the economic causes of events like the Great Depression.
Also I did mention we could bring back an option to voluntarily cede one's own freedom, for those that don't want to bear the responsibility of living with the consequences of their own bad decisions, so I don't think our disagreement is exactly how you've characterised it. It's more like we disagree on whether we should prevent people from having the option to live freely.
Make decisions for your own life? I would hope we could at least agree on the definition of common words and this wouldn't become a definition wack-a-mole.
I think that's both naive and wishful thinking. Like a BSD vs GPL argument, one can have many definitions of what constitutes freedom.
Is BSD more free because it places no restrictions, or is the GPL more free because it guarantees freedom to those further on in the chain?
I'm not going to attempt an answer because it's the stuff of decades of internet flamewars. Similarly I don't think that libertarian freedoms are necessarily the only definitions, particularly as they seem to enshrine ownership of land and property as absolute, which come at a cost to the freedoms of others to make use of land or possessions. (I'm not looking for a debate on why that may or may not be right or wrong, simply to establish that what makes someone or something the most free is not 100% clear cut)
So no, we can't really agree on a definition of free or freely.
I think if you ask 10 people on the street which definition of freedom is correct, all 10 of them would agree with mine. But in any case, you know what I mean by 'freedom'. I've given enough context to make that clear. My conception of freedom, by any other name, would still be my conception of freedom. What word you want to assign to is immaterial to the essence of my point.
I don't feel this discussion can proceed constructively anymore.
Maybe, maybe not. You certainly frame your definition as if you believe it to be the only one. I believe that libertarians often frame their arguments as concerning freedom, as we in the west tend to believe freedom is unequivocally the best thing. It's the hidden assumptions and definitions about freedom as defined in libertarian thought which I find interesting, and biased.
Sure, now looking at property rights where it comes to land, if I want to set up house in your wheat field, and you stop me, are you not impinging on my freedom?
This whole discussion would be much easier with an example.
I have spent quite a lot of time debating cryptocurrencies with people and explaining why they could be useful. But with ICOs I find myself on the other side of the fence. I have yet to find a white paper that isn't either useless or impossible.
> and thus doesn't meet securities regulations
In this context "doesn't meet regulations" more often than not means "we lie about what we will use the money for". I'm not sure that's a good idea.
It is impossible to be serious in a space dominated by liars as they will outcompete you every time.
BAT and FunFair are neither impossible nor useless.
>I'm not sure that's a good idea.
But if someone thinks it's a good idea, we should forcibly deny them the right to invest their own money in it? I simply don't understand the justification for such a strong-arming intrusion.
>It is impossible to be serious in a space dominated by liars as they will outcompete you every time.
Reputation is a very real and powerful thing in the marketplace. In the long run scammers and other unscrupulous types cannot compete against honest providers who deliver. And by the way, I'm fine with going after confirmed scammers. I'm not okay with centralizing/banning an industry to preemptively prevent scams.
The cryptocurrency market is incredibly resilient. I've been involved in it for years and seen that even after the worst crises, it comes back stronger. Absent centralizing regulations, eventually all of the industries created by the new use-cases it enables will mature, with innovative technological solutions and much higher levels of consumer awareness, which is a much more robust outcome than the regulatory one that would devolve into a closed Old Boys/Girls club like the traditional financial sector.
OK so I got about two thirds of the way through that before my brain rebelled and my focus went elsewhere.
Thanks for the link though, that was an interesting read. I was aware that "Caveat Emptor" was a bit of a libertarian tenet, and that people like to rely on things like reputation to enforce good trading practice, but that is an interesting explanation of why a libertarian may be against any and all government interference in even blatant fraud.
If people really don't want the responsibility of freedom we can bring back indentured servitude, where people sign away their rights.