Nov. 8, 2022: Vote Crypto 🇺🇸🗳️🗽
LBRY Election Surprise Puts Cryptocurrency on the Ballot
At the dawn of history, tyrants claimed the throne by right of the gods.
Removing the church from the state cost a thousand years of bloodshed.
Enshrined by the US at its birth, such separation would become a key to its success.
Will the fight to separate money from the state also exact such a steep toll?
Will existing powers recognize the benefits of stateless money to extending their power?
Or will emerging nations embrace this concept first, and use it to displace decaying empires?
The Battle of the Billionaires has drawn to a surprise close, but we already find ourselves thrust into the next great battle.
It’s Election Day in America, ground zero of the assault against cryptocurrency. Americans must vote on one issue, and one issue alone: cryptocurrency policy.
The outcome affects the planet. We’ve seen lately how America leads, then the rest of the world bleeds.
It’s been exactly three months since the United States issued unconstitutional and ethically reprehensible sanctions on an Ethereum address. Two days later an open source developer was detained by EU lapdogs. Their government still refuses to even issue charges. This is clearly a human rights atrocity. Nobody imagines it’s anything but a direct result of the United State’s backwater stance against cryptocurrency.
The US has been hostile towards cryptocurrency since its outset, (c/f Ross Ulbricht, the ICO crackdown, et al). The government’s recent antics nonetheless place 2022 among its most hostile years on record.
Yesterday Americans suffered a late “October Surprise” in terms of a court ruling on the longstanding “LBRY” case.
The TL/DR: this absurd precedent massively expands what constitutes an “expectation of profit.” Earmarking tokens to the team, a common and necessary task for any crypto project, is now considered evidence of guilt by the ruling regime.
Developers need never even utter a single word — their intentions are presumed guilty unless innocence is established. Judges can police the absence of speech, imputing motives and empowering regulators to take enforcement action against thoughtcrimes.
Never mind that withholding a supply tokens could be done for hundreds of legitimate technical reasons disconnected with profit-seeking. As a practical matter, a startup crypto project has very few arrows in its quiver other than some control over its own token. This outcome is unworkable.
The law of unintended consequences remains undefeated. This ruling only serves to guarantee a US-based cryptocurrency project could only be far less equitable. Now illegal is the reasonable practice of disclosing tokenomics regarding team allocation and offering a token in a fair release to the public. The only quasi-legal approach to a US token launch would resemble the early days of Bitcoin — “launch” into the shadows, ensuring only the team and a few elites can scoop up the supply before anybody is aware the project even exists.
The effects of this decision are clear.
The ruling amounts to a letter of marque for Gary’s attempts to pillage the entire crypto space. Even if his party loses power, he has broad authority to continue his quixotic anti-crypto crusade.
We begin to suspect why the authorities have been dragging their feet on the Ripple case.
This ruling effectively renders it impossible to launch a cryptocurrency project in the United States. Way to go Uncle Sam, you’ve completely relinquished any hope of allowing the future of the economy to percolate without our borders. Why would any developer allow America to reap the economic windfall of their handiwork, when America is threatening them at every step of the process?
The legal avenues for appeal are also seemingly nonexistent in this case. The United States has ably abused its judicial process to massively expand their powers in its war on cryptocurrency.
Remember, this is just one front in the government’s multi-pronged assault on cryptocurrency. Separately, the Ooki DAO case threatens to expand the government’s capability of serving enforcement orders.
Before you find yourself too despondent, remember the judicial system is just one separate but equal branch of the federal system. In theory, the government works for us, the voting citizens of the United States. We have the power to clearly make our voices heard at the ballot box.
The United States court system is reinventing crypto policy in the absence of legislative guidance, where Congress has been slowly deliberating. Our strongest counter-attack is to elect the most explicitly pro-cryptocurrency slate of legislators to Congress. Let’s make attacking cryptocurrency so politically toxic that the executive branch never dares to exercise these misappropriated powers.
Remember all variety of dumb policies remain on the books, but shifting political winds influence enforcement priorities. Pennsylvanians are still technically required to disassemble their car in the presence of horses, but in practice nobody does so because society has evolved alongside technological progress. As crypto becomes mainstream, let’s relegate these insane judicial diktats to the dustbin of history.
US Citizens: don’t treat this like routine DAO governance. VOTE! Ignore the party affiliations. Ignore the culture war distractions. Fill out an explicitly pro-cryptocurrency ballot.
Non-Americans, please contact five to ten of your US voting friends and urge them to vote explicitly on cryptocurrency issues when casting their votes. Americans are quite lazy, so help us out as best you can. Provide resources like PAC DAO and Coinbase’s Crypto-Friendliness Guide to track the bipartisan group of legislators best able to represent cryptocurrency values.