Good that we finally have FinCEN trying to regulate altcoins. It will be harder for these kind of people to make any new shitcoins.
Wow...when I read that, my "writer's bug" went into overdrive. I know the full-bore libertarians and ancaps won't like the following, but the proliferation and durability of scamcoins do show how unready we are for economic liberty. (Confession: I'm very much part of the "we.") We came in here with habits resulting from us being sheltered by the protective and controlling Regulatory State, and those habits have been a lot harder to break than rationalists would have us believe. We came in here, protected in normal life by the Regulatory State, and we thought we were shrewd...only to find that we were sheltered. Again, I'm very much part of the "we."
Here's a word-to-the-wise glimpse of the kind of smarts needed to thrive in a completely unregulated economy, courtesy of the early Benjamin Graham from the tail-end of the laissez-faire days. When he started off teaching security analysis he said flatly that if you have your eyes on a capital gain - any amount of capital gain - you are a
speculator. You're not an
investor until you keep your eye on income and the avoidance of capital losses (i.e., safety.) That's a glimpse of the kind of
habitual hard-headedness needed to make your way in laissez-faire. By the normal standard of those days, we are living in an Age of Fools - or an Age of Recklessness.
Here's another quick glimpse: back in the laissez-faire days, lotteries - and even gambling - were considered immoral by mainstream opinion. Period. Back in those days, "quick buck artists" were considered shady, or at the very minimum contemptible because they set a bad example.
It's been one heckuva field test we've been living through: an all-out field test of the anarcho-capitalist ideal. Sadly, one of the results of this here field test is that we're far more creatures of habit - Regulatory-State-inculcated habit - that we realized. (Once again, I'm very much part of the "we.") The only people who've emerged unscathed are those who are suspicious by nature: the ones who take red flags far more seriously than most of us.
tl;dr: In this day and age, it's too early to implement the ancap ideal. We have a lot of habits - lost except to specialized histories and historical snippets here and there - to build up before we're ready for laissez-faire. And the irony of it is, Bitcoin's sudden success actually cut us off from the amount of time we need to discover and cultivate those habits of hard-headedness.
I was born in a welfare state
Ruled by bureaucracy
Controlled by civil servants
And people dressed in grey
Got no privacy got no liberty
'cause the twentieth century people
Took it all away from me....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrmQB38aT5U
