Gary Gensler isn't targeting individual crypto users. He isn't even targeting Bitcoin; these suits are related to other coins that fall under ordinary, existing securities regulations. This is just routine civil law enforcement of the sort that occurs in every industry; if crypto is an exception, it's only because companies in that space have an unusual tendency to break the law.
Yeah, so punish SBF for that specific instance of fraud. No need for a “securities and exchange commission” to decide how they feel about numbers in a ledger.
The SEC should exist to help investors know what they’re buying, and should essentially be publishing due diligence reports and assisting in fraud cases. The idea that they get to essentially legislate via administrative fiat, with no input from congress, and certainly no input from American voters is absolutely an absurd overstep.
The SEC does answer to Congress. Are you saying that they should go get congressional approval before each and every enforcement action? If so, nothing would ever happen because Congress gets nothing done. They’ve suspended voting for the rest of the week due to infighting within the majority party.
Back to Binance, regulators are alleging that Binance commingled customer funds in offshore accounts, according to NYT. One pattern that seems to emerge consistently is that the anti-regulatory and anti-banking sentiment among these companies leads them to be careless and disorganized about their business operations, we saw it with FTX.
A lot of those accounting control and financial rules exist to prevent things like fraud and tax evasion, and it’s no surprise to see companies that try to get around the rules committing fraud and tax evasion.
This has zero to do with “numbers in a ledger” and everything to do with “you’re taking in billions in customer funds, and it’s our job to ensure that you’re not going to fail in a way that harms the markets.”
