I think it would be pretty cool to see Coinbase employees go to prison for insider trading. Not out of any sort of vengeance, I just think it would be a huge paradigm shift in cryptoland. Continuing saga between regulation and pure greed/manipulation of cryptos. I assume most country's (especially the US's) federal regulations are way too slow to verify this is in fact true illegal insider trading though?
I don't really know if any Coinbase employees really committed insider trading - I'm just speculating based on the fact that the price of BCH appeared to rise significantly before the public announcement.
Its also unclear what internal firm policies that Coinbase has in place to prevent insider trading, see my reply to hisabness for more on that and an explanation (note: IANAL) of how regulation could be applied.
There is nothing cool about tearing people away from their families and locking them in tiny cages for such a nebulous and arguably victimless "crime."
Um, I don't mean to be rude here, but "victimless" usually means that there is no victim, and that's the point. To paraphrase your question, "In what way is there no victim?" seems a bit like trying to prove a negative, so let's look for the positive instead.
Let me try to identify the potential victims here:
1. The victim might be "the guy who bought the BCH that the employee was selling", seeing that he could have bought for a cheaper price had the employee not insider traded.
2. The victim(s) might be "all the other investors of BCH", with the thinking that the insider trades devalue BCH (somehow?).
3. the victim(s) might be "the customers of Coinbase", because ... I'm not sure, maybe jealousy?
I'm trying to be reasonable here, but everything I wrote up there seems outlandish or silly. (1) a person who enters into a buy for X agrees to buy for X, and calling somehow who willfully enters into a trade a "victim" is an incorrect use of the English language; in (2), nothing is devalued, the additional buy from the employee should actually increase the coins value, as it represents a higher demand; and (3), 'jealousy', seems like the only thing left. If you're upset that someone at Coinbase managed to earn $$$$ on their trades, but you only earned $$, then we call that emotion "jealousy", and that would be the harm. It would be a harm to your ego, and now you would think that you were a victim. It seems ludicrous to me to support the tearing apart of families (as was suggested earlier) simply because someone is jealous of money.
I can't come up with a reasonable definition of who the victim is, who was harmed, how they were harmed, etc. This isn't proof of the negative, "victimless", and certainly there could be other real victims here (maybe Coinbase itself is the victim? or the US Government? or "the whole of the American public"?); but, it should probably not be assumed to have a victim unless some real, actual harm can be identified. IOW, there is no victim without an identifiable harm.
