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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27101 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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very few people want to live in a world where those things are not regulated at all.

If crypto has taught me anything it's that a lot of people do want to live in a financial world where those things are not regulated at all (at least for a while).

My experience of dealing with the crypto community is that Bitcoiners favour a world with no fractional reserve banking at all, not a world with unregulated fractional reserve banking. They think (incorrectly) that Bitcoin enables this. The wider decentralised finance community (most but by no means all of whom use Ethereum) think that decentralised fractional reserve banking should be possible, but attempts to do it keep blowing up.

It’s more that people are still in denial that the current world of financial regulation is there for a reason. It never fails to entertain me when a new crypto scandal leads to an “innovation” which is just traditional banking with extra steps. As Matt Levine likes to say:

In one sense, crypto is in the business of constantly reinventing or rediscovering the basic ideas of financial history

And I’m inclined to agree.

Well, until they lose all their money.

Stupid or bad actors losing money is in fact a form of regulation, there's just nobody to pin blame on for it.

That's likely largely a reaction to everything else being regulated to a fare-thee-well. You need a bevy of professional licenses to do anything useful and lucrative nowadays (with the possible exception of computer programming), crypto offers a (false) way out.

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