Sept 8, 2021: Crypto is Not A Crime ✊✊
How you can take action after Coinbase blows the whistle on regulatory overreach
If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.
As a group of shadow-y super coders, we don’t like to cause trouble. Over the past few years while both political parties escalated the discourse to the level of violence and chaos, we tended to hide out in our basements and mint jpegs. Now we’re coming under direct attack.
The abusive language in the Infrastructure Bill hasn’t even become law, and regulators are already running amok. They’re already acting to criminalize Uniswap and Coinbase, the rest of crypto is surely in their cross-hairs.
The most recent revelations by Coinbase are particularly ugly. We’ve all seen the pictures in the history books of citizens transporting loads of hyper-inflated cash to purchase a loaf of bread. Yet at least the Weimar Republic wasn’t so sinister and cruel as to ban wheelbarrows in the process.
People can be forgiven for doing anything to escape hyper-inflation. We know .01% won’t cut it, so desperate citizens are turning to cryptocurrency as their only hope. Many have families who need to eat. Now the powers-that-be are attempting to forbid using cryptocurrency to take a gamble at escaping this mess.
It’s particularly odious because the politicians caused this problem in the first place by jacking up the money supply. It’s bad when they steer you into an iceberg. It’s downright evil when they walk around puncturing holes into the life rafts.
Chillingly, they’re also collecting details on anybody daring to dream for better than 0.01% yield.
Some attention has to be given to the traditional crypto lobbying firms. We respect that they tried valiantly, evident in their lobbying efforts on the infrastructure bill. We’ve given them millions of dollars, which they used to wine and dine politicians.
This approach failed, and it failed abysmally. In the end they affected zero change to the language of the infrastructure bill. The ink hasn’t even dried, yet over-zealous regulators are already taking the opportunity to maul Uniswap, Coinbase, and soon the rest of crypto. HECKUVA JOB, BARRY!
They’re still playing checkers while their opponents are loading pistols. We have to acknowledge the battlefield has shifted. These firms have the clout and resources to organize a pro-crypto rally in DC. All donors must threaten to withhold funds until they do.
What we’re living through is most technically defined as a form of anarcho-terrorism, a period in which the laws are generally not enforced en masse, yet a handful of law-abiding citizens are singled out and punished to make an example.
Angry tweets won’t save us. If you want to help, here’s some ideas:
Turbo-autists… use your skills to investigate. Who’s guilty of insider trading? They’re collecting names, so should we. Let’s get some people fired.
This response by Selkis is also tactically sound. Call your Senators and Representatives and demand they hold hearings. Again, it would be helpful if legacy crypto advocacy groups used their abilities to organize such efforts.
For my sake, I’m putting my time and energy into PAC DAO. PAC DAO is built different from existing crypto advocacy groups. It’s crypto-native, building out and leveraging a community with the responsiveness and effectiveness of a DAO.
This weekend PAC DAO launched its founder token so it could officially get off the ground, successfully raising >17 ETH and counting. In ordinary circumstances this would be time to pause and celebrate. At the moment, with mortars whistling overhead, we’re immediately putting this dry powder to work.
We see this latest madness as an error in our political system that needs to be fixed. Therefore we’re solving it like developers would fix any error. We’re crowdsourcing a political bug bounty to whichever politician steps up and solves this problem.
We’re also aiming big. We’re laying the groundwork to raise up to a $1 BILLION bug bounty, which will be paid to the aligned PAC of the Representative or Senator who corrects this error. Should multiple parties step up, it will be split.
Legally, money is speech. The crypto community has no shortage of money.
Our legal team is hard at work building the regulatory pipeline, while the dev team is building the infrastructure to make it happen. Join the Discord server if you’re interested in helping us organize, offering your thoughts, or simply watching the action.
Finally, I’m making some structural changes here at the Substack to support the cause.
For the better part of a year I’ve been pounding the keyboard every working day to write my idle thoughts, mostly learning in public about DeFi, with a particular affinity towards Curve and Convex. Amazingly, I’ve steadily gained more audience than I lost throughout this time. Almost all of this growth has been spread via word of mouth from readers like you. Thank you!
With this steadily growing influence, as well as my tendency to not pull punches, some changes are in order to protect this particularly pawn and hopefully let me enjoy life on the chessboard a bit longer.
With this in mind, I’ve enabled the paid Substack features. Some posts will remain free, others (probably the ones that could get me in the most trouble) will be put behind a paywall. It will be a balancing experiment to get this right, but having a cadre of paid subscribers will allow me to be more responsive to the best readers going forward. Realistically, if you can’t afford a few bucks a month for a Substack, you have no business nosing around DeFi anyway.
The newsletter is now technically property of a private corporation, along with the liability protection this affords. However, since the goal of this newsletter has never been to profit, we continue this pledge and operate with full spirit of independence. We’ve been quite happy to run this newsletter for free and we still seek no compensation for these efforts. Therefore, any and all funds collected through Substack will be used only for any direct expenses (which will always be disclosed to the community), with any excess pledged to support PAC DAO. Should this policy ever change, we’ll announce it publicly.
If so you choose to subscribe (Thank you!), note that Substack may auto-renew your subscription, so subscribing indicates informed consent about Substack’s renewal policies. If you’re subscribing, you also probably have a sense about the type of content you may receive. You’re surely well aware that we have never and will never offer legal, investment or financial advice, nor do we endorse any third party links or protocols we discuss.
We will continue to offer similar content of the nature we’ve offered in the past — some code snippets and advanced quantitative analysis when we have time, memes and s—posts when we’re busy. We may even occasionally get things wrong, in which case you would be knowingly paying for misinfo, though we at least strive to fess up when we err.
Again, we’re not planning to profit on any of this. We had been planning to wait until we hit 1K subscribers before looking into moves like this, but circumstances have forced our hand and we must work immediately to fundraise for PAC DAO. See you behind the paywall!