This should be a fun one.

In my last post, I said I was going to write about this. Since my opinions are strong, you know as well as I- I don't hold back.

In a perfect world, I would love to say about politicians how much I appreciate this person, love that person for their upstanding character and the great things they've done for making our world safer, calmer, brighter, and crypto more widespread with all of the right freedoms, always stepping in to protect us when the going gets tough... wouldn't that be lovely?

Lemme break that title down for ya'...

A guy walks into a bar, really really late, and starts walkin' around like he owns the place.

That's the idea I had in mind.

My first thought I had the other day on the topic was this:

I was born "x" years ago. The day before I was born, the sky was blue.

Now, I'll make some sense of this.

In the years to follow my birth, I would, at some point, look up and realize the sky was blue. Even later, I'd learn the word for "blue", and then we would become teenagers and debate whether the same blue I saw looked like the one YOU saw and we all thought we were geniuses, right? lol.

Back to the guy in the bar. Everybody there is a regular. They always gather around happy hour. There's the sports guys by the big screens and the small huddles in tucked away booths, but everybody has their place. They're enjoying 'their' place.

Then, Mister "check me out" comes in 20 minutes before closing, never seen him before in your life, and he wants to tell you about the best ingredients in a dark lager, or "what's that your drinkin'? oh, that's not really a micro-brewery... as long as you know there's nothing special about it" or, "hey Sam, if you tip the pitcher when you pour the tap you'll get a better result". Funny how I don't go to bars and haven't had a beer in half a lifetime, but this is the analogy that comes to mind.

I think of the know-it-all that nobody asked for the opinion of, who doesn't seem to arrive with any of his own friends, who seems completely unaware of the timber, feel, style, general atmosphere of the place but feels perfectly at home, bouncing off the walls like a bull in a china shop.

Actually, a bull and China are the PERFECT analogies!

What's it all mean, Gordon?

I'm talking about our regulators.

They are suddenly SO interested in what we do.

They suddenly care SO much about protecting us from those scary money launderers and ransomware-ers.

Despite their need to protect their child molesting pals right up to the Maxwell case, they want to make sure the world is safe from human trafficking, as long as none of the traffickers ever get caught.

It's really hard to take a single person in the government seriously, but we all know we're completely screwed if the pseudo-good guys don't present themselves sometime in the very, very near future.

After 13 years of Bitcoin, 9-10 years or so of Litecoin and Ether, more than 7 years of stablecoins and all of us just assuming 'this' is how all of this stuff works, suddenly there is enough happening in DeFi, lending, staking, borrowing, that the efficiency of markets could potentially, very rapidly, scale to the point that it digs into their pockets before they got a chance to wake up and realize... this is all because of them!!!!!!

If they were awake at the wheel, things like 2008 would never have happened.

If they were doing their regulatory jobs, things like Epstein's Island never would have gotten to be the multi-continent pleasure dome that it had become.

Seriously. We're told this is the kind of thing it is all about, right?

If the world of crypto were truly about sex trafficking, illegal drug sales, protecting extortionists, illegal arms and all of the Silk Road era 'stuff', I wouldn't want to have anything to do with it.

The fact that there are important human innovations and inventions happening in the space matters a great deal to me. It appeals to the "being a part of something significant in our time" part of my personality.

I see some of the same huge warning signs with Ether and centralization, potentially bad design flaws, fees and other stuff, but I also see the massive new market potential that it has opened up. At the very same time, I see the absolute purity in Bitcoin's origin and how fantastic it has maintained to this point, and just as important, I understand that there is not enough money in the world, let alone in our small crypto nook of the world, to make NGU happen across the board. Volume can swell to and fro different markets, but if it doesn't eventually land in the right spots with a tiny handful of markets, we'll never see that actual result we expect to see from 'mass adoption'. That mass adoption is happening right now, and the bad guys in government are scared.

The IMF is literally threatening the safety of an entire country because of their freedom-centric decisions and a big ole volcano to mint Bitcoin. If that isn't taking what nature gives 'ya and turning it into innovation, I don't know what is. Hopefully they don't end up being evil, because sometimes volcanoes make cool origin stories for villains, too- lol.

The point being, these guys walk into our world, where we know the game, we know the goods, we get the assets, we get the culture, we don't all agree but we find our little cliques and we make it our own, and they act like this thing they just discovered needs a label, needs to be wrapped in a different bow, needs different packaging and a better slogan. 

"Maybe if we make it to where you can't get any without sitting on a Xerox machine and making a copy of your butt and sending it to a 3rd party verification system" lol JK but, you gotta love the intentional Xerox reference.

"Maybe if we make it to where you have to be able to reverse charges it would be ok to let them issue Bitcoins at the bank".

I'm making up slightly altered things that have been suggested, in case you didn't know. Yeah, one of our Congress-people suggested this stuff can't "be allowed" unless people could reverse transactions.

"What if we provide more clarity by making it really confusing who has to classify as a broker?"

It's like they're saying, guys we love what you've done with the place for the past 13 years, and you really did a bang up job with the whole "blockchain" and everything, but we've gotta bring this whole willlwillllwessst thing down to the nuts n bolts and kick the tires and take a peak under the hood... make sure everything's all tuned and safe for the road.

Sorry pal, but we've been running 6 lanes of traffic in 2 directions for 13 years without needing your assessment of a single thing. Someone gets a flat, the community comes together and fixes it right up.

There's something incredibly annoying about regulators suddenly realizing that China and Russia are superior at manipulating the market with their energy scares, threats of banning, showing promise, threatening, promise, threat, etc. 

We must ban all energy use that we do not approve!

WHO thinks that is a good idea? ONLY the people that want to buy the shares in the right power companies the day before, THAT's who!

A little known fact: Enron was behind the California brown-outs. We were given access to the actual phone calls they had about it. The U.N. and the left supporting their globalism had to protect the environmental scare behind the illusion of the sudden threat of the population explosion and limited resources or the whole world would know this as common knowledge. They joked... half-joked that they would start listing weather on the stock exchange and get filthy f'ing rich... insert maniacal laugh.

You will pardon me if the same kind of politicians that did nothing back then, are the same folks doing nothing today, and I still don't trust them to have a single noble bone in their bodies. They want to capture everyone's wealth in every form possible, and shame people for trying to find inventive ways of holding on to it. But, these are our innovations.

These are OUR beauts, and we're darned proud of them.

It's OUR Satoshi, not theirs.

It's OUR wacked out not-sure-exactly-what-he-is-ever-actually-saying Vitalik, not theirs! (okay, there's a very real possibility he's one of theirs- lol).

Slap a court battle on XRP... if you cared about justice, you'd want to get to the bottom of things and get people their rightful investments they missed out on (pardon, but XRP was heading for a massive pump and they would have actually started being in profit... until you launched the suit RIGHT at the top of the pump) as fast as possible. But, it is the SEC dragging their feet at every single legal micro-detail. They want to own the "we look strong" and they want to own the fear mongering that goes along. (I rhymed).

Go after BlockFi for not being a registered security but making people money year after year. They paid your ransomware, you big thugs!

Who's here to protect us from YOU!!!!!????????!!!!!!

Go after stablecoins for having 3x the actual cash reserves you have in the central banking fractional reserve system at best, 30x more likely, while proving they had the cash equivalents they already stated on their website, while making NY state deals with other stablecoins that never seem to be the center of curiosity or concern.

I absolutely hate the hypocrisy, hate the dishonesty, manipulation of facts, playing dumb just at the right time, bringing in literal Russian spies with a background in economics to see if we'll notice that they suggested to close all private banking in the U.S. But, we're conspiracy theorists if we warn of a Communist infiltration.

You do see what I'm getting at, don't you?

This is not a game. This is OUR speakeasy, and we sometimes feel like we're the only decent people actually working our butts off (hehe, mentioned butts 3 times in one post) to earn an honest living. We hide in the shadows because you call us shadowy super-coders. We seek the cover of politicians who 'get it' because we want the freedom to what? To use the electricity that we pay for? Like, who gives you the right to play God with the right to plug things in? There's plenty to go around if you run the grid properly!!!!!!! What are you doing with all of that state t@x money anyway??????

So, I was born 'x' years ago, but the day before, the sky was blue. 5 years later, it was still blue, but I saw it. This did not change anything, unless we're talking theoretical physics, then we enter an entirely new ball game.

The fact that regulators are suddenly concerned that the efficiency of a stablecoin could mess with money market funds means they need to classify it, name it, re-categorize it, t@x it 3 more times for good measure, see if they can only be allowed through banks, or perhaps they give transmitter laws for their own category, or perhaps just ban them all together and come up with Matrix-level security for the biggest scam coin coming down the shoot- the CBDC.

Hey Joe, waddya call this thing? We need to become experts by Monday, ok?

Yeah, I have no idea what that is, but I'm sure we need to give all authority to the Sec of the Treasury to prevent people from using it wrong.

Well, if it ain't a commodity or a money thing, maybe it's a security-majig, hand it over to Gary, he wants to eat everything!

It is embarrassing, but 10X more, it is infuriating. They are playing games with the only real chance at earthly freedom of some tiny form, that will ever exist again. I am not exaggerating when I say this. If you clamp down on privacy in the last meaningful way, there is nowhere left, nothing left, no one left, that can operate with the rights we all deserve.

And on that lofty note, I truly hope you give these things some insightful thought... talk with your friends and family about what you want the world to look like and read this again... for now, Crypto Gordon Freeman, praying for the 'permission' to be free again in the future, for now... out.