The establishment is learning that if they want to attack something, they need to make it legal. How long did they try to curb the pirating of music and cinema? Time after time they failed to stop people from experiencing their content for free.
Today pirating content is much less of an issue. The market pivoted; it gave the people what they wanted: the ability to watch a wide range of content on demand for a low monthly fee. Services like Netflix and Hulu have greatly lowered the incentive to pirate content. The convenience and quality of these services now vastly outweigh the perk of free content, generally speaking.
Directly fighting the problem has always been extremely ineffective. Take the war on drugs, for example. There is a lot to unpack here, but for the most part [pretending to] fight the problem directly only made everyone who didn't get caught (the majority) richer from it. In addition, the judicial resistance to drugs creates a snowball effect of all kinds of other crimes around drug activity that would have never existed otherwise.
Marijuana was never a gateway drug. The gateway has always been and will always be the black market in general. Making marijuana illegal in the first place was the gateway.
The other day i was watching a documentary called Murder Mountain about drug culture in Humboldt County. It wasn't until weed was made legal that all of these grow operations really began to suffer and disappear.
And so it is with all regulation. Regulation is used to stifle innovation, monopolize the market, and squeeze out the competition. Once a company becomes "too big to fail" they are able to play the game of manipulating regulation and flat out breaking their own rules because doing so is actually financially viable regardless of the fines incurred.
Will the establishment do the same thing to crypto as they did to the Internet and everything else? Centralize the fuck out of it and control every little detail? No one knows for sure, but they sure are trying their damnedest.
Personally, I'm very bullish. I think the vast majority of people greatly underestimate the blockchain. They look at it like it's a corporate entity or some other tech product of the past. However, nothing like it has ever existed. Trying to compare it to what we already know is a big mistake.
The ability to create and transfer value according to the custom rules of the underlying community can not be understated. In twenty years, there will be a suitable set of rules in place for everyone on the planet. If not, a new crypto will be created to satisfy the new demand.
Anyone who thinks the blockchain needs regulation is either uninformed or is selling something. Blockchain regulates itself. It is the definition of opt-in governance. DPOS is a republic the likes of which the world has never seen.
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