Once again, something a little longer that most people will not take the time to read, let alone think through before forming an opinion;
This space is full of obedient bootlickers for powerful, empathyless corporations, while regulation is treated as something inherently evil.
Almost every functioning part of human civilisation is regulated in some form.
Property, contracts, education, medicine, science, construction, food safety, transport, borders, financial markets and even the democratic exercise of political power depend on agreed rules, standards and limits.
Human coexistence itself is regulation. Without rules, the strongest actor does not become freer. It simply becomes powerful enough to impose its own rules on everyone else.
Civilisation is not the absence of restraint. It is the replacement of arbitrary power with institutions and rules that apply beyond the personal interests of whoever happens to be strongest.
The Massachusetts Constitution described the objective as “a government of laws and not of men.” Hobbes argued that life without an enforceable social order would become “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
You do not have to accept every conclusion of Hobbes to understand the underlying point: freedom without enforceable limits on power eventually becomes the freedom of the powerful to dominate everyone else.
That is exactly what much of crypto refuses to understand.
People here recognise government power immediately, yet become intellectually blind when the same power is exercised privately by Binance, HTX or another centralised corporation.
A CEX can hold your assets, block withdrawals, freeze accounts, decide which markets exist, determine listing access, collect fees from every transaction and change its conditions whenever it chooses.
Somehow, placing legal limits on that power is called oppression, while allowing the corporation to exercise it without accountability is called freedom.
That is not a serious theory of liberty. It is corporate submission disguised as anti establishment thinking.
Even genuinely decentralised systems are not ruleless.
Smart contracts are rules. Consensus mechanisms are rules.
Token issuance is governed by rules. Validators follow rules.
Protocol upgrades follow governance processes.
Elinor Ostrom’s work demonstrated that communities can successfully govern shared resources without surrendering everything to either states or corporations, but they still require rules, monitoring and enforcement mechanisms.
Decentralisation changes who creates and enforces the rules. It does not abolish the need for them.
The intelligent question has never been whether regulation is universally good or universally bad.
The intelligent questions are who writes it, whose interests it protects, whether it is proportionate, whether it can be challenged, whether it restrains arbitrary power and whether its benefits justify its costs.
Some regulations protect the public. Some protect incumbents.
Some are outdated, corrupt, excessive or designed by industries to eliminate smaller competitors.
Some serve your interests, while others serve the interests of people whose priorities conflict with yours.
That tension is not proof that all regulation is tyranny. It is the permanent political problem of living among millions of other people with competing rights, risks and interests.
I support freedom.
That is precisely why I want limits on both state power and corporate power. Freedom does not mean handing unlimited control to governments, corporations, billionaire empires, banks, media conglomerates or centralised exchanges and then praying that the people at the top behave honourably.
Without effective regulation, wealth does not simply remain unequal.
It compounds into political power, media power, market power and eventually social control.
The United States increasingly shows what happens when a tiny group of billionaires can accumulate more wealth than entire populations, finance political campaigns, shape public opinion, influence legislation, control major communication platforms and buy access to institutions ordinary people could never reach.
That level of private power is not freedom.
It is oligarchy. It may not be 1:1 identical to fascism or communism, but the concentration of economic, political and informational power in the hands of a small ruling class begins to resemble the same authoritarian structure: a few people control the resources, the institutions and the narrative, while everyone else is told that this arrangement represents liberty.
Freedom requires limits on anyone powerful enough to dominate others.
That includes the state, but it also includes corporations, billionaire dynasties, banks, monopolies and crypto empires.
A society that restrains only public power while allowing private power to grow without limits is not truly free. It has simply replaced elected authority with unelected rulers.
Freedom means protecting individuals from arbitrary domination, regardless of whether the institution exercising that power is a government, a bank or a crypto exchange.
The people screaming that every restriction on Binance or Ketamelon Musk is an attack on freedom are comparing apples with oranges.
They are confusing the freedom of users with the freedom of a corporation to exploit users.
Those are not the same thing, and very often they are direct opposites.
