Opinion | Yes, Crypto crashes again. Blockchain will survive.
As Terra Luna’s spiral of death accelerated, supporters, known as “Gullinger”, tossed between terror and hope as Mr. Kwon spat more than $ 1 billion into Bitcoin into the system in an attempt to restore stability. “Deploy more capital – steady boys“, he tweeted.
But in the end, not enough money came in to offset the outflow, just as in a normal bank run, and this special experiment of replacing trust with mathematics was over. Among the many thousands of failed crypto experiments, Terra Luna stands out as one of the largest, bringing with it approximately $ 60 billion in total market value.
The loud opponents of crypto have been quick to celebrate the blockchain’s death, insisting that all crypto is fraudulent. These critics are a reflection of the equally unrealistic cheerleaders at the opposite end of the spectrum: the pro-crypto-libertarians who call for a financial world without any regulation.
Responsible players in the crypto market have called for and contributed to developing a sensible regulatory framework for many years. A bedrock of crypto-regulations already exists; In the United States, federal agencies such as the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission began considering separate aspects of trade and taxation in 2013. In October, the Department of Justice announced the formation of the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team. The list of crypto fraudsters who have already gone to prison far exceeds the number of bankers imprisoned in the United States for their role in the 2008 financial crisis.
In the early days of the internet, the circus atmosphere made it easy to ignore the dangers that were brewing – surveillance capitalism and illegal authorities snooping among them – and it would have serious global consequences. Over time, regulations became in place: privacy frameworks, such as some provisions of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 in the United States and the 2016 General Data Protection Regulation in Europe, and voice protection as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
At the same time, the wonders of the Internet multiplied, magic that now seems imperceptible: a map of the world, street by street, in your pocket; immediate translations from almost any language; a lookup service for each branch of knowledge; global, almost immediate news. Today’s internet is deeply woven into the world’s economies, media, politics, industry and social life, in good and bad ways.
