Fools and their crypto
Every few decades, libertarians need to be reminded why regulations exist. Time passes, and people forget why the SEC, FTC, FDA, FDIC, OSHA, child labor laws, et al were even created.<p>Cryptocurrencies created a completely anarchic monetary system, which people have used to layer investment systems on top of. Naturally, low hanging fruit scams and cons have arisen, and some form of governing structure will eventually be imposed, if not by actual governments, then by the community. Then more sophisticated abuses and negative externalities will arise, and ever more sophisticated regulations will be imposed by the community to thwart them.<p>In the end you may end up with something very much looking like a government, where people with connections and leverage in the governing structures get to decide the evolution of the rules, where a few players with disproportionate wealth or hashing power, help elect those people to committee positions. And once again, people will be looking to create systems to escape the defacto control and cronyism imposed on the system.<p>I guess what I'm saying is, nature abhors a vacuum, and given human nature, most systems will evolve to thwart the worse tendencies of the worst people, opening opportunities for others to capture power. So in the end, rather than seek to bring down our democratically elected government monetary systems via technology, we should seek to evolve them with ideas from technology.<p>Because booting out fiat currency and rebooting with crypto really just forces a painful relearning of all of the lessons we've learned in the last century of modern finance.