Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor says crypto regulations would speed adoption

[so98nn]

Don’t know, I’m little skeptical about it. Many of fellow peeps here saying it’s positive thing to regulate the crypto but I don’t know I’m really against it. This is straight away failing the principle of Mr. Satoshi and his vision of freedom.

If we want the crypto regulated then it would be just another payment system or stock or share market. It won’t benefit us. We can’t risk it with regulations. This will literally push the crypto currencies in the black hole and sucking all the good characteristics of bitcoin.

[Lucius]

Don’t know, I’m little skeptical about it. Many of fellow peeps here saying it’s positive thing to regulate the crypto but I don’t know I’m really against it. This is straight away failing the principle of Mr. Satoshi and his vision of freedom.

We have to come to terms with the fact that the old spirit that lived the first few years of Bitcoin's existence is increasingly fading and disappearing because people like Saylor have a completely different philosophy on how to use Bitcoin. Imagine a situation where the world's 100 largest companies buy 100 000 BTC and we have 10 million BTC locked as a store of value - for some it would probably be a dream come true because the price would surely skyrocket, but for small people who have not yet discovered Bitcoin, it meant they would pay a high price to get into that game.

If we want the crypto regulated then it would be just another payment system or stock or share market. It won’t benefit us. We can’t risk it with regulations. This will literally push the crypto currencies in the black hole and sucking all the good characteristics of bitcoin.

It is inevitable that if we want an adaptation that must happen in regulation, and the second option is to move underground and show the governments of the world the middle finger. However, there is a third option to consider, and in this scenario, Bitcoin may play the role of a Trojan horse that will cause significant changes within the existing financial system - but in order to do so, it must be positioned there. This would mean that some battles are fought and must be lost in order to win the war in the end.

[Anonylz]

Am not surprised, it is bound to happen sooner or later, although doing this completely negate the narrative of privacy but it will gain widespread adoption according to Saylor.

Now the question is which one is most pressing! Remain in the original narrative without regulations and no adoption or change the narrative, give up privacy and gain adoption? Since we can't have it both ways, there is opportunity cost,

Adoption will be achieved but at the cost of something also valuable, and from the above posts, it seems the majority already agrees to regulations.

[HenryRomp]

Saylor is a genius. He's right. If you haven't watched "The Saylor Series" yet, you should now.

[DaveF]

He somewhat has a point. I'm guessing that some institutional investors are very undecided with bitcoin/crypto is due to the regulatory uncertainty. Simply having clearer regulations regardless if positive or negative will give them a better assessment if bitcoin would be a "good" investment or not risk/reward-wise.

I'm afraid it is more complicated than that. Basically I'd say it depends on the regulations and how restrictive and terrible they are. For example Japan and El Salvador both regulated bitcoin and that led to an increase in the speed of adoption. But if we see restrictive regulations as US loves to implement and they end up with huge taxation, a lot of nonsense intrusive KYC and things like that, it could actually slow down adoption, at least in US.

But as I said things are a lot more complicated than that. The more restrictions could actually backfire and it could push more people towards bitcoin specially as US dollar keeps tanking and inflation soars. If we see another recession then bitcoin adoption could also go through the roof with US dollar value dumping harder than ever.

More regulation although I don't like it will allow certain people to invest who now cannot.
There are a lot of funds / brokers / banks / etc. that cannot invest at the moment due to the way their internal regulations are written.
It's a policy and risk management issue.
Before the XYZ retirement fund can invest in this or that, they have to have certain things in place. If not, they have to pass on the investment.
Nothing more then that.

-Dave

[e_abrams]

I agree with him, actually. Most of the mainstream public will want the safety of government regulations before it accepts Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Said regulation will make the industry more popular. Whether the actual industry will remain the same, however, is another matter altogether.

[stepwilli]

Is this starting to enter the concept of centralization that we are not aware of with the regulations on the exchange. If it fully impacts on massive adoption, then how will the impact of government control in controlling crypto exchanges will make it easier for institutions to dominate the market. Adoption is important, but setting policies that will only narrow down privacy is definitely not good for crypto users.

I do not know if what is the difference of this new regulation compare to what we have now on exchanges but let us hope that it was not too much that it can cause more harm than good.

There are countries and people that are waiting for bitcoin to be regulated first before they will use it but do we really need to sacrifice some important features just for their sake? But who are they, we do not even know them very well. They are the one's that needs to adjust and not us that are already here because they are new on this scene. The current state of adoption is doing fine with the current system that we have now. No need to rush and risk what we already have built.

[RapTarX]

Despite some problem people may face, I would agree too that regulation would speed up the adoption. India has recently forced users to pay 30% taxes on their gain. I guess this is better for us though the taxes are quite high. There will be people who didn’t know/own cryptocurrency but now they know. Institutions now have some way to invest in cryptocurrency. I'm sure most institutional investors will look for diversity & cryptocurrency is definitely is better choice IMO. They wouldn’t invest in cryptocurrency ever, had the rules not applied in India. Well, for widely adopted, regulation is good.

[Leviathan.007]

Depends on who you are asking and talking about adoption, for example for anyone who really cares about privacy and wants to have always anonymous transactions regulation won't be something favorite, surely. But for any government and big organization regulation can certainly speed up the adoption or better to say in their own ideas regulation is necessary for the next step on bitcoin adoption. However, even after these regulations and legalizations, there will be many people unhappy because of the regulations because of the possible limits.

[coolcoinz]

Saylor is a genius. He's right. If you haven't watched "The Saylor Series" yet, you should now.

He is smart but if we believe in what he's saying he can wait years for this investment to bring profit, but can he really? He's just a human with all our vulnerabilities. Say he becomes sick, or his child, and money at hand won't be able to cover it, say there's a way and he has to do some cuts, or maybe he finds an even better investment, goes into debt, there's a lot of options. I tend not to put people on pedestals too fast. We had so many bitcoin lovers like McAfee or Musk, or more recently Trace Mayer, who turned to pumping shitcoins. I'd hate to see Saylor do the same.

[tippytoes]

Saylor is a genius. He's right. If you haven't watched "The Saylor Series" yet, you should now.

He is smart but if we believe in what he's saying he can wait years for this investment to bring profit, but can he really? He's just a human with all our vulnerabilities. Say he becomes sick, or his child, and money at hand won't be able to cover it, say there's a way and he has to do some cuts, or maybe he finds an even better investment, goes into debt, there's a lot of options. I tend not to put people on pedestals too fast. We had so many bitcoin lovers like McAfee or Musk, or more recently Trace Mayer, who turned to pumping shitcoins. I'd hate to see Saylor do the same.

Bottomline, we are always entitled to change our decisions when the situation calls for. We can say one thing, but it is always open for alteration if other things need to be done. We are just humans, subject to ever changing evolvement. Saylor, is no exception, don't treat what he is saying as his absolute action. Because the future is unseen, so as a human, we react on what is presented to us.

[dothebeats]

It would be nice if the regulations are aimed towards the secure development of the space and not just regulations that are aimed to limit the growth of crypto. Most of the time they are just placing regulations to monitor people's activities, and are not really keen on helping them to achieve more and be with the people at all.

While I do believe that what Saylor is saying is partly true, I don't think regulations, per se, would be enough of a motivation for people to adopt cryptocurrencies.

[hatshepsut93]

It would speed up adoption by large institutions, but not by small retail investors. It also won't make people use it as a currency more, even though it's one of the steps needed for that, but still price volatility would be preventing that. So, Saylor has his own interests in mind first, and not the interests of Bitcoin community as a whole.

[Kakmakr]

Well, in a way I will agree that Crypto regulations will help adoption, because the definition of Bitcoin currently in the US is that it is some kind of Commodity and if the Biden administration clearly define that Bitcoin could be used as legal tender (which will never happen) then Bitcoin adoption will be faster.

The retail industry and large franchises (McDonalds / KFC / Burger King etc) will not risk going against current regulation to accept Bitcoin directly as a payment option. (They bypass this via the Payment processor loophole) 

[Pmalek]

Depends on who you are asking and talking about adoption, for example for anyone who really cares about privacy and wants to have always anonymous transactions regulation won't be something favorite, surely.

The government and its institutions will continue to find new ways so that the majority of people will find it too bothersome to remain anonymous. Or in some cases, pretty much impossible. It's not in their interest to not know how you earn and spend your money, including digital currencies.

Saylor is right when he says that more regulation will increase the adoption rates. It will open the door to new investors who wont mind the regulatory framework. The number of people wanting to stay outside and remain untraceable and private will unfortunately shrink.   

[Accardo]

Regulating Bitcoin because of adoption is not a perfect Idea. People that will adopt Bitcoin will do so whether regulated or not. This is more than ten years of bitcoin's existence without being regulated and more people in the world know about Bitcoin. What matters is to allow bitcoin the way It was created by Satoshi. The longer Bitcoin stays the more people will adopt it. Michael Saylor as a business man needs fast profits so he would need a large percentage of people to adopt Bitcoin because he is among the whales in the market. I don't want Bitcoin to be regulated by the government.

[pooya87]

There are a lot of funds / brokers / banks / etc. that cannot invest at the moment due to the way their internal regulations are written.

I don't think that's what we want.

Some may not agree with this part of my views but we don't want more investors, we want more users. People who aren't in bitcoin because they think they can make some fiat profit and get out and not care about anything else.
Even if you don't agree with that, I think you can agree with the fact that volatility has been one of the reasons that adoption has been slow. More brokers, banks, etc. coming in and getting involved in trading bitcoin is only going to increase the volatility and market manipulation specially if they also control the media which they do.

But I agree that regulations could potentially remove some obstacles against adoption. For example businesses and merchants who couldn't accept bitcoin payment due to lack of clear regulations could start accepting it which helps adoption by a lot.

[LUCKMCFLY]

Saylor said the regulations and policies implemented by the government might accelerate the adoption of bitcoin, even though prominent people say so, but still there are some investors who do not want to be involved in the regulations that are implemented, maybe for various reasons of their own, but it is difficult for us if we don't follow every regulation that has been issued by the government, if we don't follow government regulations our movement will definitely be complicated, we'll see in the future is it possible that the implementation of the regulations will accelerate bitcoin adoption..

What happens is that governments like this want to go against BTC and everything it represents, they have to accept that it is money, and it is a lot of money that moves in the market, obviously people will enter the market as soon as they have knowledge, but regulations are very easy to jump, you just don't have to put KYC and start doing it, because one of the things for which Satoshi created BTC is so that our money is managed by ourselves, not by governments or banks that tell us how much we must move, how much we can have, I think that the regulations, even with VPNs, can be skipped. I know a friend who lives in Spain and from there he evades Doing in a spectacular way, he never pays taxes, nor can they trace his operations.

[Anonylz]

What happens is that governments like this want to go against BTC and everything it represents, they have to accept that it is money, and it is a lot of money that moves in the market, obviously people will enter the market as soon as they have knowledge, but regulations are very easy to jump, you just don't have to put KYC and start doing it, because one of the things for which Satoshi created BTC is so that our money is managed by ourselves, not by governments or banks that tell us how much we must move, how much we can have, I think that the regulations, even with VPNs, can be skipped. I know a friend who lives in Spain and from there he evades Doing in a spectacular way, he never pays taxes, nor can they trace his operations.

Yeah the only thing regulations will bring is control which has always been the target of governments, if this happens, they are finally having their way, the majority of btc community are normal users who don't have that much technical knowledge to use vpn bypass restrictions, those who understand things properly will seek alternative ways to handle the situation,
But so far this hasn't been official yet, so we just have to wait and see how it will turn out. if regulating the crypto space will be the only way to attain mass adoption.

[vv181]

Is this where we are heading! Without regulations from the government, btc will never be able to achieve the so desirable adoption, if people like Saylor is publicly calling for regulations it means soon we will witness it, what do you guys think would happen, and what about btc maxis who are strongly in support of decentralization and privacy, will they be willing to give that regulation in other to use btc?

First and foremost regulations are inevitable whether we like it or not. Sooner or later any country will try to regulate bitcoin in any sense, it is been known that regulation tends to lag behind technological innovation, and the more mature and known Bitcoin, the government will bat an eye into it to put up the regulation.

Arguably, I think those kinds of regulations won't bother too much to maxis since I believe as long as the underlying itself isn't bothered like the past example of the mining pool who attempt to censor the tx that they mined, it will keep the decentralization and privacy.