ABIB will call a spade a spade.

Less than a year ago, at the ASIC Summit, Joe Longo laughed on stage, calling Bitcoin “something from nothing.”

Now, at the National Press Club, he says: “There’s plenty of blame to go around with what went wrong (First Guardian, Shield Master, etc), and one of the things is we need to slow people down a bit.”

Australians are tired of being treated as if they are lemmings; held back and penalised by slow-moving, arrogant, and misinformed regulators.

ASIC’s talk of “innovation” is nothing more than a misguided grasp for relevance.

By repeatedly conflating Bitcoin with speculative crypto tokens, ASIC has fuelled public confusion and must be held accountable when Australians are burned as a result.

It has been eager to regulate Bitcoin as though it were a financial product, yet has never engaged with Australia’s Bitcoin industry.

Ever.

ASIC has been silent.

The rest of the world is accelerating, Australia can’t even be seen in the rear-view, and ASIC wants to press harder on the brakes.

It cannot manage its current remit but insists Australians must “go slow” for their own protection, after two decades of failing to understand what Bitcoin is, and isn’t.

This regulate-first, ask-questions-later mindset will strangle domestic business, drive capital and talent offshore, eliminate competition in the markt, and reinstall the same intermediaries in a digital wrapper, all out of wilful ignorance and bureaucratic convenience.

If ASIC wants competition and opportunity, it must first learn the difference between permissionless open protocols and Pokémon cards.

Until then, ASIC should hit their brakes, pull over, and ask a few locals for directions.

They’re lost.