The most atrocious criminals in this world ironically don't break any laws. They make the laws, and they construct them in such a way that even if they get caught breaking them it's just a slap on the wrist and back to business as usual.
Crypto is flipping this governance model on its ear and allowing communities to be in charge of their own governance. The only ones who make the rules are the networks themselves. There is no other way to enforce these things other than getting legitimate consensus of at least 51% (more like 75% or 80% on Hive).
This puts the legacy rule builders of this world in quite an awkward position. Crypto used to be small enough to ignore, but now it's very obvious that it isn't going away. In fact, it is growing exponentially, leading the regulators to scramble in an attempt to control the centralized tendrils of the cryptosphere.
Yeah, sure, government can control the likes of Coinbase, Bittrex, Kraken, and others. But as we can plainly see there are other centralized exchanges like Binance and Huobi that aren't so easily tamed. Add to this all the decentralized exchanges and platforms like Thorchain (Rune) and it's easy so see that this situation will continue spiraling out of control. The establishment is crumbling before our very eyes.
At this point government won't be able to follow it's own rules and the hypocrisy will be revealed at full strength. They expect to regulate crypto with laws that were written a hundred years ago. It's asinine and nonsensical.
In America, crypto isn't considered currency, because that would make it much more difficult to tax. Rather, it is considered property. But that's the thing about property, isn't it? It has low liquidity and you don't actually know how much it's worth until it's traded for something who's worth we do know.
For example, if I'm airdropped some random token with zero liquidity but the current value of that token displays a value of $1M, theoretically the government could come knocking at my door claiming that I owe taxes on $1M. Then someone dumps it and the value drops immediately to zero, because there was no liquidity to begin with. None of these laws make sense on any metric when we look at the outlying cases.
We can't be surprised that government continues to do what government has been doing for generations: trying to consolidate power and control everything. Their actions regarding crypto show them for what they truly are: slave drivers. Citizens are a product of their country. They are owned by their country, and everything they do/build can be taken from them at any time, and we call it 'justice': icing on the shitcake.
Again, crypto stops this from happening. There are going to be some wild court cases where people simply refuse to hand over their crypto to the government, or more likely will simply claim to not have access to it.
How hard is it to manage your money from behind bars? In the legacy economy, your accounts have been frozen and they confiscated everything they could find. On Hive, it's as easy as delegating your powered up stake to another account if you find yourself on ice.
People who are careful about these things can not be stopped. If possession is nine tenths of the law, and you don't incriminate yourself, and they don't gain access to your keys, and you have the money to hire a good lawyer... well, that all adds up to a lot of rich libertarians who will constantly flip the bird to government and actually win the battle. I expect the whole "taxation is theft" mantra to gain quite a bit more traction over the next decade.
Victimless white-collar financial crimes are dealt with very gingerly by design. Why? Because all the rich criminals in charge of this world want to make sure that their own circle is protected. The IRS is underfunded by design and given little access to the big guns of the surveillance networks put in place. At this point Amazon and Tesla have more power than the IRS. This is a pyramid of permissions, and with so many loop holes it's easy to get confused about how things actually work.
So I ended up cashing some crypto out to my bank account for the first time ever the other day. It went through a lot faster than I thought it would. Takes 5 business days to transfer from my bank to Coinbase. This withdrawal only took 1 day. Small miracles.
Of course I sold Bitcoin at the absolute low ($30k) and took a huge loss after buying at $50k with a stimulus check, so maybe that had something to do with it. It will be interesting to see if money coming in from other sources takes longer to clear.
You can't buy the dip if you are the dip.
People with deep pockets are FOMOing into Bitcoin something fierce over the last year. We are experiencing an intense supply shock, just like we do every four years. Things are just starting to get interesting.
However, it's important to point out that crypto is still very small. We are just a tiny spec flipping the bird to the legacy economy as they chuckle at the notion that they could be uprooted by such a ragtag band of rebels. How silly of these ants to think they could take down a lion!
Sometimes the underdog wins.
Isn't that what all these movies are about? Righting wrongs and bringing actual justice to the world? (And not counterproductive revenge cycles.) There's a reason why cop dramas are so popular. The world is broken and people want a story that tells them it isn't. The bad guy always loses; The good guy always wins. Crypto is that story, except this time it actually might bleed into the real world.
Conclusion
The bar has been lowered for Rule-builders. We are now all rule builders. Clearly, there will be much conflict and strife between crypto and the legacy systems in place. Expect friction to build and fires to breakout, specially when the mega-bubble fills/pops.