Bitcoin Forum

Like the saying goes, where there is no law, there is no sin.

This is why the crypto world has been plagued with so much frauds and scams. The scams in different crypto affairs from ICOs, to bounties, airdrops, mining, etc have continued to be on the rise.

Studies have also shown that the number of scam or fraudulent ICOs in this year 2018 alone, already exceeds the record of all previous years put together. This unwanted record is likely to continue into 2019 and beyond if nothing is done to checkmate it.

I am also bothered that if the series of frauds are not checked, then the cryptocurrency concept which is still striving to gain more grounds and reputation may be dead without us realizing it. This frauds has also caused a lot of ICOs longer time than necessary to complete its token sales no matter how realistic the project might be.

Much ado about the talks that regulation will end decentralization. I don't believe so.

There has to be Global Regulatory Authority which all ICOs or crypto related project must pass due diligence test before even commencing any form of bounty and token sales.

I believe this will reduce greatly the frauds or scams and give more confidence in cryptocurrency, and consequently more investments.

What are your thoughts on this?

regulation does not stop scams

regulation just means a scammer has paid a fee to get a sherrifs badge and then gets to police its customers.
take the banks.. how many bank managers got arrested for the 2007-8 housing criss/mortgage scam

regulations are not about decreasing scams they are just a way for an authority to get money because the authority dictates a group of people doing a certain activity need to pay a fee.

if you look at the dodgy scammers. they are not getting caught up in legal issues due to the scams. they are getting caught in legal issues because they didnt register their activity and pay the fee

what is needed is not regulation. but instead CONSUMER PROTECTION. where by access to the court system is made easier and where users can report on shady businesses easily. thus making business customers the police, monitoring and reporting on businesses.. not businesses reporting on customers

regulators dont care about scammers, as long as it doesnt cost regulators money to reimburse customers.

Agree with you, regulations would bring back the trust to some aspects of cryptocurrency such as in ICOs. Also, this might pave the way to fully recognize digital coins in different countries. Some countries such as Australia is planning to set up its regulations.

But isn't the debauchery land, i mean, a lot of people is already in jail for this.


Yeah, but the number of Pozis have gone down, if you see is hard to find nowadays on the forum the famous 'Doublers'. Now the easy money is on ICO's and there is the min scamns.


I see a problem about this, bitcoin don't have a nation. So, what laws should it follow? lets suppose it takes murican laws, and there comes an Indo scammer, should USA chase the Indo guy out of his territory for scamming?

Is a complex topic my friend, and if it doesn't have a regulation at this point, is because govs havn't find the way.

It is true that regulations don't stop scams or fraud. No one is talking about elimination, rather it is control that the OP means. At present, it is only conscience that prevents someone from scamming or defrauding using crypto. And you can guess how few such people are.

Crypto seems to require an institution that can control this problem. If this can happen then it does not rule out the possibility that it will be a plus for crypto from developing countries who are still doubtful about bitcoin or crypto itself.

Here several questions arise at once: who will create such a regulatory institution, who will be the participants of this regulatory institution, who will pay for the work of this institution? And why not just lead all the ICO on the platforms that are designed for this purpose.

You could be making a point when saying regulations do not stop scams,our conventional system is regulated,but yet scams are still present,but at what scale?

Centralization may not stop scams totally but definitely it'll reduce the level of scams, when there abounds a body to crosscheck projects and managers of projects,when this projects go through proper scrutiny before its brought to the open community,definitely that will be controlling and reducing scam to its bearest minimum...

But regulations to me will defeat what the system was built upon and that's decentralization,which means a lack of control by any system or regulatory body whatsoever

The large issue around regulating cryptocurrency is that the laws and outlook differ greatly from each country to the next so how can there be one set and defined standard? Until that staged is reached regulation is a fairly futile idea as under what jurisdiction should things be regulated? I do think eventually there will be a more global view as you suggested and it will decrease the level of scams but it won't put a full stop to them, it's just more red tape that makes the process more difficult but potentially more lucrative for those scams that go through the effort.

You need law as things doesn't stay faithful and legal for the entire community, you leave crypto alone and unfortunate cases would definitely happen, there's gains and loses if something is freely exposed and some ppl would simply convert these processes in harmful activities that greatly benefit and harming the innocents, regulation is needed at a global level but that doesn't really match up with current positions from many authorities, there must a relationship for certain party for gains, so do regulation with all those collection of fees

While profit oriented projects might be on the rise. Investments in ICOs and new projects has been steadily dropping over the course of the year.

And regulation would not put an end to scam projects. But it would surely reduce the freedom people have to explore the potential in the blockchain technology.

You are right and with ICO regulations the cryptocurrency entirely will have more ground breaking records due to the fact that adequate regulations and access of new projects will give room for efficiency and good performance in that way any intending scam projects will be detected and flush out before it get to the general public.

Yes you are very right. A lot of innocent people have been badly hurt by this fraudulent activities since the whole thing is currently free without any form of restriction. The global regulation will help to reduce those frauds.

regulations dont stop scams.
regulations just add a hefty pricetag for businesses to startup. and un-organised/poor scammers wont pay.
so its not about scammers reduce due to a law. they reduce because of the pricetag to be certified

meaning RICH scammers will still scam. and poor scammers dont because the point of poor scamming is to get funds not give funds

however if there was consumer protections which had a price tag to accredit a business. the same positive result occurs where poor scammers dont accredit themselves. but the other positive is that businesses then get policed so that the rich scammers also risk penalties for screwing with customers

in short consumer protection and regulation both pricetag poor scammers out of attempting to start up, both accredit honest businesses
where as regulation would have let them scam and give the scammer privileges to police its customers
but consumer protection lets customers have rights to police the business

we all know the government want controls. but instead of making the SEC a pay for-certification agency letting businesses set up policies of how a business will stop customers doing stuff. what should happen is things like better business bureau and courts let customers have more power over the businesses they choose to interact with

basically spin the power upside down more in favour of the user not the business

Don't you think that the so called Global Regulatory Authority will then eventually take away the concept of decentralization ?
Only the people from the GRA will be able to pass an ICO which means it will be a centralized authority.
Also, it doesn't mean that if a GRA has approved an ICO to be launched it won't scam the people. The ICO can still scam the people anyway.

having laws to protect people is great.
no one is saying no to law. what people are saying is WHICH law
regulations are not a law to protect citizens. the financial crises proved that

consumer protection laws would protect citizens
we should not keep going in circles whre businesses have the upper hand of grabbing funds under trust so they can screw people over. all regulation does is only let certain rich groups get the "trust" to scam later because those rich groups can afford the membersbip. the membership doesnt arrest people for scamming. it arrests people for not being a member

people need to look behind what regulation really is before lobbying for it. again look to the financial criss as a big example of how useless regulation is in regards to consumer protection. realise when regulated the businesses themselves develop and implement their own policies (self regulate) again useless

what PEOPLE need is easy access to ways to get scammy businesses caught. because right now you cant just report a business to th local cops and things happen. and taking them to court is a bureaucratic nightmare.. its consumer protection that needs developing.. not regulation

for those that dont understand.
consumer protection= "power to the people"
regulation= "power to the elite corps"

Even if they scam people they will surely end up rotting in jail because of the global regulations and the fang of law will be implemented unlike now there are a lot of Fake and Scam ICO's that are sprouting like a mushroom from nowhere to everywhere. If there is a global regulatory committee that regulates, checks KYC(Know Your Customer), authenticates identities of the persons involved in an ICO or fundraising the chances of the project to be become scam will be lessen and if ever they try to scam the investors of their project there is a high chance that the funds that have been jeopardized will be returned to the investors.

How the heck it will be a centralized authority? So do you mean that it is okay that those scam projects multiply all over the crypto space and scam a lot of investors? ???

I definitely  agree with you, the government sould finid the issue to control the digital coin worldwide

By starting to build a supervisory agency where it will reduce the fraudulent impact of a coin coin scam or ico itself. That will make a significant impact on the progress of crypto currencies in the world in the end.

i strongly disagree because of the type of majority of these scams.
for example the biggest plague is the plague of ICO scams, Ponzi schemes, and other way-too-obvious-scams that always makes you think why people would even fall for them in first place.
regulations and "law" won't change this. the problem is people themselves, their greediness combined with their idiocy creates this opportunity for scammers to rip them off!

It is rumored that the SEC is secretly investigating thousands of ICOs.

Considering the growth of complaints about fraud, I think that we need to wait for new criminal cases, since cryptocurrency is being equated to securities.

Its true that the number of scams are increasing. But mere regulations is not enough to get rid of the scams completely. Also regulations can defeat the purpose of cryptocurrency.

the thing about fraud and scammers is that as long as people are gullible, there will be scammers. the more gullible and desperate they are the more scam cases we will see. for example the ICO scams that OP mentions that grew in 2018 is a good example. the reason for it was simple. with the growth of bitcoin we had a lot of newcomers and among them were a lot of gullible newbies. on the other hand we had this simple method of creating a token fast and cheap and easy, so obviously the result was a fast creation of thousands of ICO scams.
in other words the growth in scam cases was not just because of the community size growth but mostly because of the easy methods that were created for scamming.

all the crypto-related scams are trips where crypto will get better, I think if we are all crypto users then we have to be crypto users who are quite smart, namely crypto users who always do research before joining investment activities related to crypto. and I think in terms of fraud in the form of investment, of course not only related to crypto, even in the form of real investment, it can happen because fraudsters will cheat from any field, so as I said, as a crypto user, it must always do enough detailed research so we never make mistakes.

Yes, there is a need to curb such frauds. Yes, there should be a governing bofy keep a check on ICO's. Yes, things have to change otherwise the end of Cryptos will be soon.

But, Regulation may or may not stop scam is a debatable topic. In my opinion Regulation will not stop Scam. If it was possible then Bank fraud/Scam would have Stopped.

I believe it is the responsibility of Investor/trader to educate themselves in Identifying such Scam projects.

   

the fear that I had last year is coming true today.
I said this before during the happy hour of altcoin pumps that everyone was enjoying the shitshow of shitcoins. their pumps is now biting us in the ass. all the scams, all the manipulations and the crashes and losses,... are making the whole system look bad not just them. today we see multiple articles talk about shitcoins and their negative sides while implying that altcoins and bitcoin are all the same.

as for regulations, I say ICOs should be banned. but not by the government. instead they should be banned by the community. people should stop allowing them to even exist. the same way they stopped paying attention to any altcoin that had premine. this is what decentralization means.

Its good to have regulatory body, it could be prevent more scam or fraud, at least this regulatory could wipe out the unnecessary and unpotential coin to over flow the market and give more confidence to the investors, but when we talk about regulation of course it will take away the concept of decentralisation, but if it can make crypto grow bigger and better then I dont mind with the regulation

As the market grows - alts tend to grow at a faster pace, and the share of the cue ball decreases. Because everyone understands that you can earn more on altos.

I saw an exception to this rule only in October and November 2017. Then, at the same time, the market grew and the share of Bitcoin grew, the altos trampled on the spot. I see only one explanation for this phenomenon - at that moment a mass of people went to the market from the street, newly minted, inexperienced, uneducated investors without outlook and fantasy who, except for the cue ball, stupidly did not know anything. However, this did not last long - in December, institutional investors again went into alts and the balance of cue / alts began to change again.

It seems like a good idea; but is there any garruanty that the Global Regulatory Authority will not be corrupt or if the GRA will be able maintain a complete regulatory control over the market? If it goes corrupt, it will bring a disaster in the market and it will most likely try to centralise the crypto currency.

Regulations won't help the main concerns with crypto as people are interested in the first place because it is not something controlled. But, in the future a lot might change and it might not be so far off as crypto regulations to be something people won't consider as a reality so we'll have to wait and see how it turns out regarding any decisions made.

Cryptocurrencies can be regulated to a certain extent withouth totally hindering its nature. A passing board for legitimized ICOs can be one form of regulation that can be implemented.

By implementing regulations, ICOs become more trustable. Thus, some trash ICOs will be elected before obtaining funds. But who will be the authority? Is it aganist to the decentralization concept of crypto? What about legislation? It is so complicated to be solved in a short term and to solve these problems may take years.

the possibility of implementation can be carried out by developed countries, but it will be very difficult in the discussion of the draft law in other countries. I think even if crypto always wants to blend in with clarity in real business, then they must be willing to let go of the attributes of decentralization for legal recognition. Perfection will not be realized if a system of controversy always focuses on a certain point, there must be a progressive unification of vision.

Of course, if there is an appropriate body with good powers,
which would regulate ICO, it would be very good. If the ICO teams took their personal documents, made copies, checked their authenticity and checked for the presence of such a citizen about his criminal past, then the number of frauds would immediately fall tenfold. One could still manage to escape from the collected funds, but then the whole ICO team would be in the international wanted list and sooner or later they would suffer the punishment. The current situation does not threaten punishment for fraudsters, since they sell their tokens and perform other actions anonymously, no one sees them. If available, if the ICO team impersonates other people, it’s almost impossible to catch them.

I've never heard this before, but if it is a saying it's a bad one. Law is to abide by people. Sin is to disobey God. Sin always exists, even for those that don't believe in a God. And the absence of law ensures that when sin is committed it is considered "OK". It's the law that declares what actions are not "OK".

Anyway, sin has nothing to do with cryptocurrency regulation. And yeah, the beauty of regulation (if there can be any) is that most cryptocurrency networks are broader and larger than any jurisdiction for regulation. The network spans beyond county, province, country, or continent. They can't end cryptocurrency unless they seize control of every node that exists.