951 sats \ 13 replies \ @mudbloodvonfrei 7 Jun 2023 \ on: Nic Carter On Bitcoin Maxis and Religion bitcoin
Attacking Coinbase and Binance is government overreach. We should all be upset about that while simultaneously being happy that bitcoin is much less fragile than shitcoins.
Overreach because you don’t think the government should be involved, period? (as in the SEC should be abolished?)
Or overreach because you don’t think the SEC is following their mandate and is over stepping?
Also, have you read the lawsuit the SEC filed?
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Truth is, I didn't read the lawsuit so I might be missing something important.
I'm not hard core libertarian, so I am not opposed to all government intervention, but I think the bar needs to be high. Do I think shitcoins are a poor investment? Sure. Do I think they're all a priori fraudulent? No. Most are, but some aren't, and those are none of the government's business.
If someone is creating a fraudulent asset then the law should pursue that person/company/entity. It seems like overreach to go after a business that provides a platform for trading something, regardless of how I feel about that thing. Especially since there are p2p exchanges that "allow" the same activity if for no other reason than that they are difficult to shut down. It's like suing a farmer's market because some farmers are selling weed to consenting adults.
There are many things I find distasteful, but that's not a high-enough bar for me to prefer government intervention.
Please tell me what you think I got wrong though!
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As I understand, scammers are as old as time itself. Years ago the government put in place certain “investor protection” laws that make it harder to scam people. A lot of this has to do with honest disclosure of how the “investment” works and ensures that customer/investor funds aren’t treated carelessly.
Some of these investments are called securities and are considered so if they pass the Howey Test - 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."
It seems like the majority of crypto tokens were scams or poorly executed to ride the hype wave, and the rest were actually unregistered securities pretending to be new tech and competes with Bitcoin itself. A core team of developers worked on a private network whose goal was to return profits for early investors. That’s not illegal, but there are things you MUST disclose to your investors in order to prevent such abhorrent fraud as we’ve seen so much of à la FTX, et al.
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Disagree. Sure it would be overreach in a true libertarian society. But unfortunately that’s not the current USA. The SEC in this case is actually enforcing laws on the books.
Reform of education and the political system is needed.
Also, since the shitcoinery has been spurred on by the fiat mindset, it is Justice that the fiat system would destroy the shitcoins on its way to destroy itself.
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I don't believe the actions of these exchanges would be acceptable in a libertarian society either. Fraud and breach of contract by front running, wash trading and pump and dump schemes are acts of aggression brought against innocent people.
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I don't know if they would, it depends on what the contract is.
Wash trading per se is not breach of contract, it doesn't require any contract. If I'm trading with myself and people watch something that's publicly visible and think it's two different people, that's their problem that they're making unfounded assumptions.
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Two different principles. Maybe the way I worded it was imprecise. You are correct re a contract, but fraud, in and of itself, violates the aggression principle. Wash trades are fraud because they materially misrepresent to a trader the buy and sell activity of the asset.
Wow! It's been many years since I have talked libertarianism! It's like the old days.
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What if someone sells a monkey jpeg NFT for $1m worth of shitcoins to themselves on a blockchain?
The jpeg goes from one eth address to another, and addresses are online identities, which as far as I'm aware, cypherpunks defend the right of the individual to have many of, and the right to reveal them selectively.
It only misrepresents the buy and sell activity if you make assumptions as to what that activity is. But in that case it's you who creates that misrepresentation, and for yourself only.
The idea of a permissionless blockchain (regardless of how permissionless and decentralized the blockchain in question actually is) is that you can do whatever you want on it and none of it is fraud, as long as you don't tie yourself up in [legal] contracts. In that case the smart contracts are the only 'law' and you can interact with them however you wish. You can't breach them by definition (because they're defined by their code), and if they contain a bug that makes them work not the way their author intended, it means the author screwed up rather than that you breached them.
If I guess your Bitcoin private key and move your coins to my wallet it's morally questionable, but it's not theft from the blockchain's POV, because who owns the keys owns the coins. From that POV it's your problem and your fault, because you didn't use enough entropy, or used a technology that wasn't secure enough etc.
Implying that any blockchain activity at all, in the absence of a legal contract, is breach of contract, defeats the point of a permissionless blockchain and opens a statist can of worms.
Binance is a CEX, so it's a different world, legal contracts may be in place and much of the above may not apply, but we're talking about wash trading in the most general sense of the term, without any legal contracts implied.
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I think we're talking apples and oranges. I'm not discussing defi. I'm talking centralized exchanges. The fraud in a wash trade is a centralized exchange creating artificial fomo by giving the impression that everyone is rushing in to buy a particular asset. It is in fact a fictional market, when it represents itself as making an actual market.
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Good point I agree. If only there was some kind of proposed libertarian society with limited government regulation that could achieve that kind of sweet spot…
It would probably be some kind of republic based representative system with balanced political power described exactly by the constitution written by the people of the United States of America.
Unfortunately we are currently far removed from that 🤦♂️
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Yes. A long way. We have to make do with baby steps.
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Anyone can reform their education if they want to and it's no one else's business.
As for the political system, it should be destroyed. In self-defense.
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If a shitcoiner is killed in their own home by one of the victims of their crimes, I imagine you will be the first to call them a fake capitalist for calling the police and mention how it is government overreach for the police to be involved?
I really hate all these bad-faith LIARS who would not say these things. Liberty-LARPers
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