Mutually Exclusive Paragraphs

You can't have your cake and eat it too. A proverb.

Fool and his money are soon parted. Another proverb.

In my language we have an idiom which I can loosely translate as the mutually exclusive paragraphs. It means something similar to "oxymoron" or "contradictory statements", two or more things that can't come together.

Since recently I've noticed an interesting trend in crypto: the apology of regulation. Apology of government regulation, to be exact. Usually, I don't like to quote particular articles, but here's a good example of what I'm talking about.

Well, it's kinda ridiculous when a freshly elected US senator talks of "How I'm going to save my live earnings in Bitcoin" instead of "How can we fix the US economy" (even though she promised "to address the US national debt" somehow). However, it's a thousand times more ridiculous to put this freshly elected US senator as a guarding middle-man (or rather, a middle-woman) in your crypto transactions. In crypto, which was exactly designed to eliminate all possible middlemen and women!

I've already said that those who's afraid of "fraudsters" should put their life savings in FDIC-insured savings accounts and US bonds. Besides, I can give excellent financial advice on how to stay safe in crypto: do not be fucking dumb! If you pour your life savings in the first shit you found hyped in Twitter after listening to a Youtube shill "influencer" -- you're simply dumb, and no government regulation can change it...

Fraudsters, scammers, wallets stealing your pennies... One smart investor was once asked: "What investment is the riskiest?" -- "Anything is the riskiest when you don't know what you're doing", he said.

Anyway, we've already got a good example of crypto regulation: it's Paypal. You can buy crypto with Paypal and hodl it in your Paypal wallet quite securely. Yes, Paypal will protect you from fraudsters and anything. Until it gets a government order to ban all its crypto hodlers... When what? You will start an Every Hodler Matters! campaign in Twitter? Ok, let's pretend Paypal will not ban all its crypto hodlers. It will not even ban that poor Bangladeshi guy, who being a non-US or EU citizen is entirely at Paypal's mercy. Anyway, with Paypal you can buy only selected coins, at Paypal's prices, and you have to keep them at Paypal's account earning exactly 0.0% for it, and at the end of the day, you can only sell them back to Paypal. Actually, the only thing you can do is to pray that the big guys on exchanges will soon push BTC high enough to justify slippage and comissions... I thought the US folks have already had enough fun with "regulation", Binance.US, tax accounting, etc. Well, it seems they haven't yet, since they want moar of regulations and rules...

I have a good example of how government regulation may look like. Today the US gov bonds is nearly the most secure investment imaginable. It may sound strange for the US guys, but it's only because most of them haven't lived their lives during double and triple-digit inflation, their currency plummeting against USD at least 2x every decade, and through a couple of state defaults. Yes, as of today the US bonds are the most secure investment imaginable. Afaik, the US folks can buy any amount of US bonds even by mail. Afaik, I may own the US bonds too: I'm not an SDN person from a sanctioned country. However, I simply can't buy that shit. No US broker will open an account for me even if I personally arrive at him in the US: I'm a suspicious stranger, I don't have all the necessary paper shit and I'm simply not wealthy enough for that. I could buy it through my local broker: it would be like pooling a tooth through the ass as we put it in my area, but it's still doable, in theory. Because besides being wealthy enough, I must prove to my government that I deserve buying that US shit, that I'm smart enough to risk my life savings into US gov bonds. "What if America defaults?", says the government of a country that has already defaulted a couple of times...

Anyway, I don't want to sound like "regulation is bad, anarchy is good". No, I just try to say that there is one way with some set of consequences and another way with another set of consequences. If "regulation" comes the life will not be "like today, only regulated". And the consequences might well be much more broad than it can be thought today. Just imagine, the "regulations" have come -- and Publish0x, Leofinance, Peakd, Read.Cash and others have asked you to do KYC and to prove that your withdrawal wallet is actually yours. Not to mention duly reporting your tips and curation earnings to tax authorities. After all, paying taxes is an "honorable duty" as we put it in my area.

"Well, what if they come and say: we either regulate crypto or ban it, you choose -- what would you choose then?", you might ask. Well, I'd prefer to choose neither. Really, why should I choose at all, and why exactly one of those two shits? "You make your choice and then I will see what I can do about it", I'd say.

In my area we have a lot of funny sayings. It's tough to sit in between two chairs, it's hard to climb a fir-tree without having your balls scratched, and the like. But I somehow recall a stranger guy who spoke really perfect English: it's Winston Churchill who in 1938 told Neville Chamberlain: You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war. Well, I hope the story of crypto regulations will not require so many pathetic words.

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