Regulation would be the least bad approach I think. The current crypto currency direction is untenable currently with the massive amounts of fraud present.
I don't think it should be regulation as much as made illegal. I'd encourage all governments to put policy in place to outlaw exchanging crypto for fiat. Until that policy takes action, you can convert still trade in your crypto.
Regulating crypto would only make the problem worse by adding legitimacy and stability where very little currently exists.
I have said all along that the easiest way to kill crypto is simply to do nothing. Just watch it collapse under the weight of it's own corruption, inefficiency and incompetence.
It’d be a stupid move to ban crypto. I’m very pro crypto, but we do need some regulation. It’s too easy to lose your account with no recourse currently. So just introduce ways for companies and consumers to be good actors.
Regulation is all about stopping people from getting taken advantage of, or hurt, usually by their own decisions.
Financial regulation is mostly about stopping people from selling dodgy investment schemes that are some variant of Ponzi.
Health and Safety regulation is mostly about stopping people from doing stupid things that might kill them.
FDA is about stopping Snake Oil salesmen. And y'know, making sure the drugs we're sold don't make us worse.
You can see it coming in the Cryptocurrency world - people lose money on stupid bets and then feel that someone else should have done something to stop this. Someone being the regulatory agencies.
So what would a solid set of regulations for crypto look like? What process would you devise that would result in a set of rules that prevented most of the crooks from profiting from their crookedness, while allowing honest folks to make some money investing in crypto?
Wouldn't regulating crypto need an influx of dollars from the exchanges or other liquidity providers back into the government? If that money doesn't exist or is hidden well enough regulation is only going to crash down liquidity providers and screw this people you are saying it should be designed to help.
The US is already very much ahead of most countries in regulating but not outright banning crypto. It's closer to banning it than let's say Switzerland. With the way they consider any sale a taxable event if US regulations were better for let's say the retail crypto trader as a whole they would all massively move to US regulated exchanges like Coinbase but that would remove a lot of "natural" circuit breakers like bots or manual arbits.
In any case, I think this is a good thing. If crypto-currencies are regulated against, the remaining crypto-currencies must succeed on their technical merits as a currency (privacy, security, byzantine fault tolerance, speed, etc.) in order to evade regulation. So this would shift the focus towards systems like Monero, Zcash, and maybe even systems like GNU Taler that work alongside existing taxation/banking institutions.
I don't think that's how the western world works. If someone or something doesn't want regulation then we look the other way. Crypto became so big that we now have to protect investors that doesn't know what they're doing. Overall we have to reduce scams, increase trust and liability
With regulations people will be loosing their money anyway, but with confidence, because they will have a sense of some legitimacy.
The only regulations crypto needs is how to call things. Just like whatever Tesla has should not be called Autopilot, crypto prophets should not be allowed to call it investment. Call it gambling and off you go.
I think this is a naive take. Crypto currency is a token of exchange. Of course it can be regulated just like everything else. All you need to do is make examples of people who get caught.
Banning crypto is only a stop gap. Eventually it will reappear somewhere.
The stock market and such used to be a sea of fraud. It wasn't until the SEC was created that it got a bit better. But even now, the market is an easy place to lose all your money. Regulations aren't the savior everyone wants them to be either but it helps.
What will work best is some regulation but best of all, education of the individual investor. Make sure people know what they are getting into. Have them understand that fast money comes at high risk.
As far as regulation, the best that can be done is self regulation. Crypto is worldwide. It's not possible to mandate rules since there is no way to enforce them for all. China has banned any type of crypto activity yet there are still mining farms there. If China's authoritarian government can not do it then it's unlikely to be done anywhere else. If the Crypto industry wants people to respect them then they will have to go toward making sure that everyone respects a set of rules and ban everyone that can't abide by them thru the establishment of a self governing body.
And to what end do people want more regulation? If anything regulation would legitimise crypto so either it should be banned or it should not be touched
As we speak, regulators are being captured by the bad cryptocurrencies; if we allow that to play out then of course regulators won't come up with nuanced policies. It'll be mining and gambling for everyone, everwhere.
We'd be better off banning it all now then later adding a carve-out for non-PoW, non-deflationary, reversible, scalable, private, actual digital cash.
Well there isn't, and I mean it. They do way more harm than good.
There isn't anything wrong with using existing secure and regulated methods (Paypal, Bank Transfer, etc), Cryptocurrencies claim to be decentralised when underneath they ARE still centralised and manipulated, especially Bitcoin.
I will only admit it has been a good run, but now it is time to for the regulators to step in.
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