I realize that by the title alone this thread is probably doomed.

I know that Warren’s comments on crypto have been contentious, but please realize they’ve largely been taken out of contexts by organizations who stand to benefit from lack of regulation even if it ends up fucking the little guy and thereafter the whole economy. Regulation isn’t a slider that goes from 0 to 1; it takes many forms and many of those forms have been shown to be necessary for the common good - clean air, clean water, safe food, weekends, 40 hour work week, etc.

A crypto market bailout may in fact be necessary, unless the markets are well regulated.

Now, I see you may already leaping to the comments to tell me why I’m a big dumb idiot; I may be one but I don’t think it’s for this reason, if you will hear me out. Yes, crypto is decentralized, and yes, no one who knows what they’re talking about would imagine how a bailout for cryptocurrency would work, but we’re talking about crypto markets.

I’ll try to put it in terms of a hypothetical.

HYPOTHETICAL:

Suppose Bitcoin becomes more adopted by institutions - it’s been a rallying cry to say that bitcoin will destroy banks, but in reality, banks are extremely adept at adapting to new technological innovations in financial tools. We love the idea of decentralization but the hard decentralization of the network effect will be rendered moot if vast sources of private capital buy up the supply and create soft centralization, as is happening now. China previously controlled a huge amount of the hash rate - China, perhaps the most centralized superpower there is. What good is the immutable ledger if people are still subject to the whims of the wealthy?

So as crypto grows in adoption, more people will need banking services - they won’t want to learn to be the custodian of their own wallets. It’s just how humans are. Alternatively, banks will simply use Bitcoin as their store of value (as desired by our community) to back their fiat transactions. Either way, directly or through the bank’s machinations, people will soon after begin to leverage the value of bitcoin for things like buying houses. If that value crumbles, and the people who will definitely still need banking services’ life savings go with it, when whatever due bill comes, there’s going to be a big money hole where the value of Bitcoin used to be. That many fucked middle class and poor people is devastating to the economy.

Thus, there will need to be a bailout just to make sure the wheels don’t fall off the bus. Everyone will be upset about it. Everyone will ask how the democrats couldn’t stop it. No one will ask why the republicans and conservative democrats stalled legislation that could have avoided this.

Now, with proper regulation, I can imagine that this can be evaded without smothering crypto in its infancy.

I know Warren racked up a lot of haters in the 2020 primaries but it’s really not necessary to be so vitriolic with an intelligent, educated person. Accusations of corruption based on a misleading title do not reflect well on the community; it makes us sound like the now closed /r/TheDonald. If we want this to be a serious community, we should be better about how quickly we dismiss dissent.

tl;dr

Warren’s comments are consistently taken out of context by entities who stand to benefit from fleecing the masses in a highly volatile, unregulated market. Regulation won’t necessarily kill crypto; it may in fact make it stronger. In other words, this is good for Bitcoin, as they say.

I expect this thread to be overrun with snake emojis and cries of Pocahontas. I hope I’m wrong.