[2017-10-31] Is it possible to find a balance?

[fanatseal2]

Blockchain technology appeared in the period when economic agents are not always guided by the principles of honesty and justice in mutual interaction. Without these principles, the very essence of crypto economy can be questioned. One of the reasons is that the absence of control and responsibility is a good precondition for scammers to quietly steal money. Therefore, the issue of regulating crypto economy is acute in many countries of the world.

The adherents of the free functioning of crypto economy firmly believe that a new form of social order is emerging. It is supposed to completely exclude mediators and, most importantly, can exist without regulation. In their opinion, cryptocurrency should have self-regulation, similarly to Smith's "invisible hand".

As practice shows, the "invisible hand" can not always operate on its own, the same applies to crypto economy. Any careless actions by the authorities and their excessive desire to regulate and complicate everything, can ruin a new emerging type of...Read more

[junoreactor]

Blockchain technology appeared in the period when economic agents are not always guided by the principles of honesty and justice in mutual interaction. Without these principles, the very essence of crypto economy can be questioned. One of the reasons is that the absence of control and responsibility is a good precondition for scammers to quietly steal money. Therefore, the issue of regulating crypto economy is acute in many countries of the world.

The adherents of the free functioning of crypto economy firmly believe that a new form of social order is emerging. It is supposed to completely exclude mediators and, most importantly, can exist without regulation. In their opinion, cryptocurrency should have self-regulation, similarly to Smith's "invisible hand".

As practice shows, the "invisible hand" can not always operate on its own, the same applies to crypto economy. Any careless actions by the authorities and their excessive desire to regulate and complicate everything, can ruin a new emerging type of...Read more

Yes, interesting, and I can totally understand the need for regulations. ICOs need to be regulated, actually Japan is taking this path. South Korea ready to tax transactions too. More regulations potentially means more investors. Many people stay away from cryptos because of scamming stories, the ones we all heard...
Australia is also willing to regulate cryptos, but for now it is just talk, Aussie government has not done much yet. Maybe next year, hopefully.

[Carlton Banks]

As practice shows, the "invisible hand" can not always operate on its own, the same applies to crypto economy.

1, no it doesn't, and 2, no it doesn't.

The invisible hand has never operated without interference for long. Whenever regular people should simply learn from their own mistakes, or learn from the mistakes of others, government and the newsmedia step in and start repeating over and over again about how much we need some authority or other "to stop this sort of thing happening". Then, the new authority fails to stop anything, and instead gets people to pay for very expensive high security housing for the transgressors (commonly referred to as "prison"), where criminal attitudes and skills are only consolidated, not reformed.


The "law" is poorly named: it is trivial to break, and therefore not any kind of law at all. That's what makes cryptocurrency (and cryptography in general) superior to man-made rules: breaking the rules of the Bitcoin network (guarded by cryptographic proofs) is next to impossible.


And so the crypto-economy can, and already does, operate on it's own. It's messy, but it's actually the capitalism that people like Adam Smith, Karl Menger and Frederic Bastiat wrote about. Except this brand of cryptographic capitalism is very difficult to interfere with, hence why the top-down authoritarians in government and the finance world are so afraid of it: because this is real capitalism, they will actually have to compete, and they're afraid of a real competition