Anyone seen the Netflix documentary Madoff? The incompetence of the SEC amazes me. It is us, you, me, and everyone else that must hold cryptocurrency projects / exchanges accountable ourselves and protect our loved ones ourselves.

Despite the present state of the market - we can't tell if this is bull or bear mode right now - if you ever see a friend or family member making an unsound investment in cryptocurrency, something extremely similar to Terra/Luna, Celsius, Voyager or BlockFi, or anything similar at all, try to calmly and quietly explain to them what happened with those projects and why they failed.

In the Documentary "Madoff", essentially what happened was some traditional finance bros found out there was this guy, Madoff, who would only take money from people he knew at his hedge fund or friends of his long-term investors at his hedge fund. Those traditional finance bros that I mentioned though? They worked at a competing hedge fund, and they were sounding the alarm on Madoff and filing reports with the SEC as early as 2001, but nothing happened until the financial crisis in 2007 when withdrawals weren't being processed. They basically presented the case to the SEC that Madoff got all of his clients money out of the market before major stock crashes and always put money in the day before things would start turning bullish again. The story is more complicated than this, but you'll have to watch the documentary to fully understand this. I don't want to make this a post about regulation, I want to make this about protecting the finances of the people you know and care about.

I'm not trying to present a bearish thesis, but my take is that (regardless of whether you want it or not), positive regulations that protect cryptocurrency investors will come slowly, if they come at all, and you need to be the one that teaches your friends and family not to make bad investments. We can't count on government offices, whose jobs it is to protect investors, to make the right choices and make the investigations they should make when they make them. I sincerely hope that in 2025 all the "Ponzi schemes with extra steps" in cryptocurrency are gone, but if they turn up, we should be there to shut them down as quickly as possible and protect those who matter to you the most.