Crime super cycle: it gets worse
People are waking up to the reality that things are going to increasingly get out of hand when it comes to the cryptocurrency markets.
When it comes to cryptocurrency investments, the only safety net that exists is due diligence. Government regulations are not going to be much help going forward and it's rather comical that this reality starts off with an enablement from said government of which, in their defense, is the only reasonable move.
Memecoins promoted by political figures like Donald Trump, lax regulations, and crypto court cases abandoned by US regulators have kicked off a crypto “crime supercycle,” say a pair of blockchain crime investigators.
Blockchain investigator ZachXBT posted to X on Thursday that crypto has historically been ripe for abuse, but that has “noticeably increased since politicians launched memecoins and numerous court cases were dropped, further enabling the behavior.”
Now this is something I've previously pointed out at the early stages of Trump and his wife's memecoin launches. I could recall writing on how the legal system will be the biggest winner at the end of the day, but of course, this is something I expect to come after Donald Trump is out of the picture.
Trump has an identity for being embarrassing and unethical, he's proved this true many times and his exploit of the cryptocurrency markets was no different. His family's active involvement, of which he has direct benefits, is also quite questionable given that it qualifies as a case of personal interest for major administrative enforcements.
But as we've seen, he doesn't seem to care, and frankly speaking, I personally don't care either, but this seems to be getting a lot of people worked up.
He claimed crypto influencers and key thought leaders face “zero repercussions” for scamming their followers.
“That said, there’s never been a worse time to be doing black hat, phishing, social engineering, robberies, vs. gray hat activity when the current environment is favorable,” ZachXBT added. — Cointelegraph report
Technically speaking, if there's no law that defines any of what's going on as a crime, can it really be considered a crime super cycle as the name doesn't quite fit?
Maybe a “rugpull super cycle” is a more appropriate way to phrase it, but it's understandable that various other exploits measures would be left out in this case.
Nonetheless, the facts remain. When it comes to token launches and subsequent pull-out of liquidity and/or large supply selling, not much of a crime is being committed by anyone. It would seem that people are more likely to pay fines for false advertising or deception promotions(generally absence of disclosure of benefits) than they are to be charged for a crime for simply creating a token and dumping it on later buyers.
Irrespective of how the Trump administration has eased regulation of the industry, it was generally always going to be difficult to regulate these things. So sure, the government is an enabler right now, but the alternative would have also been bad for regular investors.
We can easily look back and see how much protection investors had prior to Trump’s role. It was all evidently bad experiences. There wasn't any commendable protection because none of it was about protecting investors.
At the end of the day, what's most likely to protect investors is crypto education. People need to be taught how to self-custody, avoid common attacks and invest with due diligence.
Centralized regulation will never be effective without attempting what would effectively stiffen innovation and that will generally drive away builders to more crypto friendly economies.
It's a “ease up on regulation or lose the innovations” situation. There's not a chance at winning without giving the industry flexibility to self-regulate. This is something I've occasionally pointed out. Crypto's regulation is something that has to happen on-chain! What isn't enforced by code proves not very critical or can be addressed by various other measures.
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