
Cryptocurrency ads to the general public are misselling, and should be banned - davidgerard
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/07/02/cryptocurrency-ads-to-the-general-public-are-unethical-misselling-and-need-to-be-banned/
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Felz
Cryptocurrencies are so rife with scam that I'm shocked that major governments
haven't done anything to stop them yet. Are they so ineffective that if you
paper over a scam with "but the blockchain!" they won't do anything?

I guess if they did institute bans there'd be backlash, and it's not like
cryptocurrencies won't blow up all on their own. Still, it's distressingly
spineless and/or incompetent.

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davidgerard
I doubt we can ban people from buying and selling cryptos, and there'd be
quite a bit of resistance to that.

But this is about advertising to consumers - and there's ample precedent that
advertising for financial products unsuited to retail investors can quite
definitely be banned, especially in the UK.

We should _not_ be seeing crypto ads on the Tube.

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Felz
Yea. In the US agencies like the SEC and FTC and legal concepts such as
"securities" and "accredited investors" were created to prevent exactly what's
happening with crypto- people getting scammed, or overhyped on something they
don't understand.

Except apparently, we have to relearn this lesson in blood every time somebody
makes something slightly different but mechanically equivalent to something
that's burned us in the past.

You're right that it'd be hard to enforce a ban on buying/selling (although
most people wouldn't do it simply because it's illegal, which would pop the
bubble in and of itself).

But I think banning ads, issuing public warnings, and pervasively cracking
down on the clear scam ICOs would help a lot, without really impinging on
peoples' freedom to shoot themselves in the foot.

The nuclear option would be to rule that cryptocurrencies have no legal
standing- that you can't enforce a contract around them. This would cause a
swift collapse of backstabbing within the market, and the government would
only be clarifying what's already true for the overwhelming majority of ICOs-
they don't entitle you to anything.

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chrisco255
The problem is banning all coins from advertising with some sort of blanket
ban is unproductive. As it stands there are tokens that can be used to
purchase file storage (Sia), computation, gold-backed ERC20 tokens, social
media curation via Steemit, rewarding content creators via micropayments
(BAT), etc. The definition of a cryptocurrency and what it's used for is fluid
and changing. Not all crypto ads are investment oriented. I think a more
sensible approach would be to require advertisers to either encourage
responsible purchasing or warn them that a token could lose value.

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davidgerard
> Not all crypto ads are investment oriented.

They overwhelmingly are, even by clear implication as in this example.

It is possible they could do fine gradations of regulation, but how would you
not catch a case like this?

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aiCeivi9
Why not move step ahead and just ban all ads?

