Except that "financial regulation" doesn't seem to really stop much of anything in the traditional finance sector. How quickly we forget 2008 and the litany of other failures.
The 2007-8 crisis wasn't about the illicit movement of money. In fact financial regulation is what allowed us to detect and mitigate the business practices that lead to the crisis. The response was the massive QE that everyone feared would lead to terrible consequences yet instead it spurred a soft landing to what could have been 100x worse. There were no bread lines, no mass displacement, no political turmoil. You can't stop people from losing money on bad investments but you can prevent it from pulling the rest of the world down and that's what happened. That crisis should have everyone on their knees in awe at the Altar of Fiat Currency.
Nah, but nice job whitewashing QE as anything but a massive upward wealth redistribution.
Instead, the bad CDOs and CDSs could have just been unwound one by one with investment banks eating the losses and a lot of rich people becoming poor. Sure some _actual_ banks might have needed a holiday or two but instead we got TARP and QE.
What I meant is: The crypto space lacking regulation doesn't imply a claim that other currency systems don't also lack regulation in some form, nor that regulation is necessarily effective in either case. Stross didn't say regulation is perfect, he said it arose for a reason.
Stross' original statement is about regulation of traditional systems having historic drivers the crypto community had yet to re-discover, in his opinion, either in terms of broad awareness or appreciation. Challenging that would be fine (and interesting); saying "so what if it's bad? this other thing is also bad", though ...
FWIW, I think he's both right and wrong. I think there was a subset of the crypto community (and it likely strongly correlates with the productive one) aware of and actively rejecting a lot of history, but also a larger majority swept up in the hype without awareness of that information.
