If you’re defending Binance selling fake securities so corrupt venture capitalists could and can offramp their stupid fake securities tokens on retail investors, because of some knee-jerk anti-government/anti-regulation/market-maximalist nonsense, well … I question whether you’re a serious person.
Discussion
Keep it up with the clean, level headed takes. I am loving it.
Everyone can win
Take em down, get em out, tick tock next block lets goo!
I actually don’t see many people defending Binance? The biggest issue is surrounding Coinbase. I’ve been saying since they were allowed to go public that it was a mistake.
I can certainly appreciate the disdain some have for regulatory oversight, lord knows there's plenty of regulations that have questionable benefit, and in some cases a net harm. I tend to lean libertarian with this sort of thing in that regulation should be limited to no further than protecting the public from a health/safety and/or a consumer standpoint.
An example I can think of in my jurisdiction:
There were city bylaws in place that limited liquor store 1) proximity to schools, and 2) proximity to each other. The first one is well-intentioned and likely a net good in that it protects children from any alcohol related crime or social issues in the vicinity. The second is, bluntly, anticompetitive and likely is a net harm for the consumer - in fact I know of at least one example where a liquor store chain set up a shell of a store to block the nearby Costco from opening one. Fortunately the second one has since been repealed.
With respect to the SEC action, in my mind this is legal action done to crack down on scammers. Do I like or agree with everything the SEC does? Hardly. But I feel like the motivation behind this action is pretty clear - some of these tokens and exchanges have violated securities laws.
I also think the libertarian argument that all market regulation is always a net bad is just stupid, quite frankly. The regulation of things like railway gauges, electrical outlets and such, allowed for economies of scale to emerge that would have been far more Balkanized.
Libertarians argue there's no such thing as market failure -- only government failure. This is dumb and wrong.
But to your point, certainly there's a lot of bad regulation. And I rail against bad regulation all the time. In particular, land use regulation and things like NEPA that have allowed NIMBYs to destroy housing affordability in this country.
Securities aren't fake because they government says they are. They're also not real because the government says they are.
Stupid people will do stupid things (like holding funds on exchanges, or watching football). No matter how much we try to stop them. Ultimately they must live with the consequences of their stupidity.
They're useless without a functioning dispute resolution mechanism, like courts with enforceable authority, though.